Value add

You know, the buzz word in our office now-a-days is Value Add. The recession is working like a 2 edged sword and its doing its job pretty well. First of all, my company is coming up with like a ton of initiatives. Each one supposed to do more value add to the customer by improving productivity, more documentation, stricter processes, saving costs blah blah...and next there are another set of initiatives driven by the company itself to reduce the employee benefits.

But anyway, so one day I am with my friend eating dinner and he orders for curd, the innocent food serving guy brings the curd and along with it sugar, even though my friend didn't ask for it exclusively. My friend looks at it, obviously happy and says, this is value add. And I just stare at him, thinking hard on how to relate this incident with what is happening around at work and I finally manage say, you know, what our company would have done...If the customer ordered curd, they would have given him curd along side a set of documentation on how to mix sugar to it...

Moral: If the current project failed even after a Ton of documentation, the next project will not succeed by doing 2 Ton of documentation.

Amen.

Funny, my senior management staff thinks they understand the problem of over documentation and too much processes. So, in the last meeting my senior manager says, "You know I completely understand, so what I will do is that if I propose a new excel template to be introduced in the project, you guys are free to change it whatever way you want." Oh, I know a way! Select the document and press Shift-Delete.