Change Board - I

A long time ago, engineers had the freedom to make corrections to their designs when they deemed it necessary. Then some Big Wig decided that we are making too many changes and decided to remedy the situation by creating a Change Board to review each change and only approve the necessary ones.

While the intent of the Change Board was to save cost, it became a poster child of Red Tape Bureaucracy. The first problem with the Change Board was its staffing. The board should have been made of of technical experts and chief engineers. But unfortunately, those people were too busy. So instead they staffed it with expendable employees who had nothing else to do. Overnight, they went from being nobodies to being authoritative figures.

Over time, they became more and more abusive of their power, rejecting changes for ridiculous reasons: laziness at end of meeting to review the change, looking for missing information that is irrelevant to the change, or simply because the engineer asking for the change wasn't showing the board its due respect. Often engineers would have to come back to the Change Board 3-4 times to get a simple change approved. As a result of all this, costs resulting from changes have skyrocketed.

Because the solution to one problem is a much more expensive problem, I throw rocks.