Over at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/17/eds_mainframe/ you can read what happens when you count beans and think that is all that matters.

It appears that a crucial system at RBS went down because no one was looking after it. Why was no one looking after it? It was an EDS system, and when good old HP bought EDS they laid off all that dead wood, useless, engineery types. Hmmm, maybe they didn’t have lots of meetings with power point but perhaps they did have uses after all…

I’ve been listening to “Dear Granny Smith” (you can catch some at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pgm7r) a blog on the demise of the Royal Mail. One story really caught my attention,  management base route times on some software that simulates walking the routes (pegasus?). OK maybe you can walk the route but what about actually delivering letters? Walking up drives, filling in “you weren’t in” forms… Classic, management completely ignoring what the actual job function is.

You might as well figure out how long I should spend writing code by the amount of time it takes to type it. Or decide you don’t need support staff because nothing goes wrong - oo when they aren’t there things do go wrong, how did that happen?