Once upon a time, a young man called Bureaucrat fell in love with a beautiful young woman called Process. After they had been (fully) 'engaged in the process', Bureaucrat got married to Process.
'Do you ******** (name of bureaucrat) take Process to be your lawfully wedded strategic partner in sickness and in health, until death do us part?'
Bureaucrat said: 'I do'.
Marriage, in the case of Bureaucrat and Process, led to the birth of Strategic Plan and Operating Statement, followed in quick succession by Action Plan, Quality Assurance and Appraisal. Quality Assurance, as you can imagine, was the classroom swot among them and grew up to be a complete tosser.
Strategic Plan was a day dreamer with a tendency to go off into flights of fancy. Action Plan was always fighting with Operating Statement, and Appraisal was forever trying to improve his performance at school so he could catch up with his big wanker of a brother, Quality Assurance. Process was proud of them all, whilst Bureaucrat toiled away to no obvious effect, trying to keep order and discipline among his offspring, but failing miserably.
One day, Bureaucrat was restructured and from then on, he was completely unable to satisfy Process, who, after a period of reflection, followed by some consultation, implemented a fully-costed demerger plan.
Process was awarded custody of Strategic Plan, Operating Statement, Action Plan, Quality Assurance and Appraisal. Poor old Bureaucrat. Process went on to form a series of casual new strategic partnerships, out of which came the birth of Accountability, Cost Effectiveness, and Implementation, all of whom grew up to be complete bastards, wreaking havoc on All and Sundry, particularly Sundry.
Bureaucrat went on to form a strategic partnership with Apologies For Absence, but, sadly, they were unable to have children because Bureaucrat’s key skills had been outsourced.
Nevertheless, for a while, Bureaucrat could still raise some awareness (with the help of some new resource planning software), so, for an all too brief period, he was able to implement some of his performance indicators.
But then it all went to cock.
Bureaucrat didn't know what to do. He felt so frustrated by his underperformance that he called in a young expert, called Consultant, who advised Bureaucrat on how to improve his outcomes, but the result was a hopeless mess, with Apologies for Absence resigned to a life of abstention.
Bureaucrat could no longer get his matters to arise, and was left to sulk on his own. Time is a great healer, as every customer services’ manager knows, and Bureaucrat’s sulking turned to daydreaming about his youth. He fantasised about the magnificently reliable Card Index, who never once threw a wobbler.
He remembered fondly his pangs of desire for Shorthand and Duplicator. He loved that whooshing sound that Duplicator made when she was going hammer and tongs, and Shorthand’s no-nonsense and speedy approach to his matter in hand. There’s none of that these days! You-have-messages-in-your-inbox is very good-looking and very well organised, but she is a complete workaholic with no sense of humour.
Spreadsheet isn’t as glamorous as you might think - another bloody clever little know-it-all, with no life outside of work. They might know all the answers, but they have no idea what the questions are. Young people these days!
The only young person Bureaucrat had any sympathy for was Floppy Disc, who was rapidly becoming redundant. Most of these young people are not at all reliable and are forever sending error messages, or having to abort altogether. No wonder Bureaucrat wanted to log out of the process altogether.
Before Bureaucrat drafted his documents for the last time, Any Other Business, an inoffensive chap of the old school, came into the office from Human Resources, to evaluate Bureaucrat’s exit strategy.
Together, they went through a proforma to assess the levels of exit strategy robustness; the rigour with which the evaluation had been implemented; and, of course, the robustness of internal customer satisfaction.
Bureaucrat was so used to saying that everything was ‘excellent’ that everything was, of course, excellent. To enhance the measurement of excellence, Any Other Business had recently implemented a customised system which measured degrees of excellence that were graded from ‘sort of excellent’ to ‘bloody marvellously excellent’. Bureaucrat replied ‘bloody marvellously excellent’.
The forms were filled in; the boxes were ticked. The feedback was fedback into the feedback loop, and life was assured and enhanced. Everyone satisfied themselves, and they all lived bloody marvellously excellently ever after, and filed under archives.
© Andrew Hawkins 2008
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