[Closed] Tales of cost cutting going wrong your tales of woe.

I should have mentioned that the 12 different systems each had a development team somewhere in the world attached to it and the original cost saving would have come from removing those developers (and also perhaps a small saving on infrastructure).

Cougar, yours sounds not unlike the last place I was at, new admin people and outside investment brought in to 'grow the company' from the initial family firm that I joined.
Result is continual scrutiny of everybody's work, every little so-called misdemeanour and non-observation of procedures that someone had decided had to be followed exactly to her specifications, rather than the way it had worked perfectly well for ages, all these 'errors' gone through in detail at personal assessment meetings with explanations demanded as to why they'd happened and how they were to be rectified; in most instances it was down to ever more work being piled onto people in the same number of working hours, so errors crept in.
The stress this created was making me ill, so it was a huge relief to get booted out, after being at the firm for eleven years, doing a bunch of different jobs that no other single individual could actually do.
I have no idea how they're managing, I guess by having to find other people to cover what I was doing, which in most instances was covering for staff who were away sick or on holiday.
And I couldn't give a toss, because now I'm doing a job that has no stress and I'm enjoying more than I've enjoyed a job for, well, about twelve years.
Oh, and they're having a big new s****y building designed and built, which I'm certain is the sign of the business circling the plughole.

They want to upgrade a 10 year old version of our product because it's gone out of service. Upgrading to an intermediate version rather than the latest will mean they won't have to re-do a few weeks of work they've already done. Intermediate version goes out of service in early 2018

"Anyone who knows anyone we made redundant, but who used to work on this platform, please reach out to them via facebook or whatever and ask them if they're willing to come back to help us troubleshoot this"

Found the quotation that I was looking for, by C. Northcote Parkinson, he of Parkinson's Law;

Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.

spekkie - Member

Worked for a company who made one of their top software engineers redundant at great cost on a Friday and hired him back at four times his previous hourly rate as a contractor two weeks later. He contracted for 3 years and earned the equivalent of 13 years wages including his payoff. Genius.

Back in the bank, in the BACS team, we had a fairly bloated middle management staff. So they decided to keep all the middle management and cut the most experienced analyst, for reasons.

So she was given her huge full-fat redundancy package, a month's pay for each year's service which was many (and a 6 month no-compete, no-return clause). Everyone except the middle managers (who knew if she stayed, would be next in line) said it was a disaster... I was the next most experienced analyst and I ended up giving them in writing "I can't do what she does, I'm extremely good but she is godly, don't ask or expect me to fill her shoes"

Anyway. 1 month later, "Please come back! It's exactly the disaster we expected!" "Oh well I'd like to, you know, but I signed this 6 month no-return clause on my redundancy". So she came back 6 months to the day after she left, on crazy contractor rates with a golden handshake. And that's to say nothing of the business losses.

Today found out whilst trying to decide what software to have the central people roll out that development is 'siloed' meaning each area is largely autonomous. This means that with a dozen silos they all work to solve the same problem 12 times in 12 different ways with 12 different sets of tools.

Great!

Perhaps this is something of an urban legend, but it makes a good yarn...

Some years ago the Army Air Corps were waiting delivery of their Gucci new Apache helis, and decided that they better have somewhere warm and comfy to park them. Cue a large (and very expensive) contract and lengthy construction of hangers for the helis - bear in mind that we have 50 of them. Anyway, hangers all built with the latest bells and whistles - fancy roller doors, underfloor heating, you name it. The first Apaches arrive and are about to be rolled in, when some bright spark points out that the 'lump on the top' looks like it is going to hit the top of the doors.

It transpires that someone had 'forgotten' that the British version of the Apache had an avionics dome above the rotor, and had designed and built the hangers for a standard heli without the dome. Result - 50 hangers with doors too short for their helicopters.

I seem to recall that the solution was to dig out the floors by a couple of feet, and suffer flooding whenever it rained...

Royal Mail... worked at the delivery office for 11 years and in that time they spent so much on new systems of work, that didn't, it's beyond stupid.
Here's an example. Old system... mail comes in, everyone sorts it, when finished take it back to your delivery frame and sort it again into your delivery route. New system. Half the people sorting general mail, some items of mail went through 3 sorting processes instead of 1, took far longer (up to 2 hours) and seldom completed. Cost for equipment £50k trial cost £20k. Trial failed because it didn't work. Upper management still implemented it because of the cost it took. After 6 months it was scrapped and the 50k of equipment went in the skip!

Last place I worked at employed a small software company to do pretty much all of the software work that needed doing & had done for the last X years.
The company was pretty much dependant upon this software company and eventually bought it out....they were pretty much buying the people who worked their & their experience.

First thing they did was insist that they worked from the office in Letchworth, even though they were all based around Cambridge, so they all had to drive to Letchworth everyday, which didn't go down well.
I think they also switched them onto a new pension contract that wasn't half as good as their previous ones.
They then bought in new rules about staff appearance & insisted that blokes should wear shirt & ties to work. Several (including me) argued that this was potentially dangerous for those having to work in the office area & the production area, but this was ignored.

Within about 3 months, the entire software team had found new jobs, including one bloke whose sole reason for leaving was because he was forced to wear a tie to work....

I've said before I work for the blue supermarket, but cost cutting is a joke on maintenance issues, yet we spend millions on crap like davids hot curry.

Prime example is the main back up freezer door, its a big old door with heated surround, safety exit lever etc...a fair cost. The door has been there 20 years maybe and developed a crack meaning it wasn't keeping the cold in. We had snow on the roof of the freezer which was nice in the Christmas season. Called the maintenance team out to sort, they sent a specialist company for the doo, the assessment was door needed replacing plus all the extra's needed fixing as the door was on its last legs.

So what did we do, yep get the door refurbed, £100 cheaper than a new door but likely to fail again within 5 years, crazy cost cutting.

For 2 years, I built up a strong business case for a major equipment and lab investment (close to 400k). Gathered a fair amount of support across the business and had it approved. I then set up the lab, quality systems and research programs. Only two people could operate the equipment (myself and a technician). There was a limited pool of staff available who were interested in actually operating the equipment. I was forced out 6 months later due to my salary and the responsibility went to the technician.

So far as I'm aware, it's now mothballed because the technician can't be responsible for the lab and they won't hire somebody to lead it. So why build the lab??

In my new role, I'm being drafted in to fix a million pound device at a supplier. I'm the customer! I can change the job, but the problems are the same.

Needed a driveway at work, were 30kto50k.

We knew the 50k company they had done work before that had lasted 20 years. They chose the cheapest, less than year later it needs major repairs, and builder refused to do it, and left his 1k deposit.

Built a new fence, 400m. To secure the site. To save money they have only done the visible part, and put a barbed wire fence through the trees, saving made of 1kgbp

I pulled all the barbed wire out yesterday to test security and walked into the site.

Ffs

My old man worked for BAe for 27 years. Was made redundant (back in the mid 90s) with a big settlement but as he was in the middle of a big project, was taken back on as a short term contractor (on literally double the money) starting the Monday after he 'finished'. That initial contract lasted 5 years and then he got another one working on Typhoon which lasted 8 years until he retired! Best thing ever for him, but possibly not so good value for the MoD.

We had snow on the roof of the freezer which was nice in the Christmas season.

😆

Took a promotion but the role I left was not filled and I was expected to do both.
They simply wouldn't accept that my workload was too great, so I eventually left as I couldn't physically do both jobs.
They replaced me with three people, failed to maintain their quality accreditation, lost their biggest customer because of this (just over half the turnover, ~£1.5m) and had to drop to a three day week to stay open.
All because they wouldn't let me employ one person on £17-18k.
I saved over £90k worth of scrap in my first year, FFS.

Nortel Networks, 2000 ish, Harlow Site which had been there for decades, had 2000 staff, excellent facilities inc a comprehensive library with every journal going back 50+ years.

Some HR director in the US decided that he wanted all staff to have access to the same quality of reference material and as some new sites didn't have 30k journals all immaculately indexed he would solve this issue...

The solution was to shut down all on site libraries and put everything in skips.

We then had to use an outsourcing company and would request a journal article via the web, they would then photocopy it and Fedex it to us, from the US, at about £30 a pop, when previously we would just walk down the corridor and find it on a shelf...

Company folded a few years later (by applying the same mindset to everything and fiddling the books).

Genius some of this. Had many myself, I worked on a system as a subcontractor company. When we finished it was all beautifully documented and worked well. They needed changes done and we pitched but were too expensive so they hired a couple of inexperienced juniors as contractors and battled on. A year later it fell apart, I had a 10pm phone call to rescue them which I did but it cost , and I remember it distinctly, 17 times the original cost we proposed. I'd love to say that it's uncommon, it's not.

Of course the greatest of all these is the thatcher years - close " loss making" industries not accounting for the costs of paying unemployment to all the folk who lost their jobs then spend all the north sea oil money on paying unemployment! Wasted hundreds of billions.

We bought a nationwide gsm network. Installed it and didn't use it for between 5-7 years. We didn't buy enough spares so we're having to buy the last production run of later model 2G radios to install and free up spares.

Same sites had standby batteries installed that were not left on charge and the sites aircon was off. When they tried handing sites to maintenance the new batteries were tested and most found to be dead. £3 million pounds to replace dead batteries and counting.

I could go on, the amount we waste is horrendous.

I work in South America (Guyana) and my company insists on flying us home via the chaepest route. This involves taking 2-3 flights across the caribbean with Liat, the worlds most unreliable airline, to catch BA flights out of Antigua or Barbados.

At a guess, around 50% of the trips are cocked up due to delays etc, so we end up having to be put up in hotels, usually expensive, and have new flights booked (split bookings, so Liat don't get involved once they have dropped us off in Antigua/Barbados). And an extra days pay for the lost leave.

Last time this happened I reckon it was and extra £16,000 -18,000 to get our crew of 12 home! 😯

I give you Rochdale Council, who decided that the old(ish) boiler in the building they leased from us used too much gas. So they replaced a normal sized combi boiler (suitable for driving a big house) with the same sort of installation you might put in a large secondary school.

Must have cost ~£150,000 to spec, design, build and install, used five times more gas (at least!) and they lost the money because they moved out a year later.

Pretty sure that someone on the council also had an interest in a commercial heating installation business.

Ever wonder why your electricity bills are so high?

Can't say much but suffice to say the wastage is phenomenal. Apparently the station across the way was refitted with a modernised control system before being shut down for reasons best known to whoever ordered it. The fact it was, at that time, the best performing station in the world seems not to have mattered.

I worked for the equivalent of the electricity board in South Africa. Covered several of their power stations. If I could have kept 10% of the money I saw being wasted back in then I could have retired and never worked again.

That day I'd gone to site and, as anyone who's ever done this will know, I was immediately jumped upon with a load of "whilst you're here" requests that they'd been saving up for me

Working on a location based film - there were plans to film the majority of it in one particular town. The only fly in the ointment was it was a period drama and there was scaffolding up on on the buildings in the townscape. The producers baulked at the idea of paying to have the scaff taken down and put back up again. The result was that instead of filming in one town we filmed in dozens - in three counties one of them separated from the other two by quite a wide bit of sea.

One sequence - man knocks on on door and enters - goes up flight of stairs - arrives in room. Three locations 40 miles apart each needing to be altered to match each other for continuity and then reinstated afterwards. For every location each I had to recce, return to check again once the treatment was devised, travel back again to set up, travel back again for the shoot, travel back again to reinstate. So thats at least 5 trips assuming any of those jobs can be achieved in one visit. Except on all these days I've got the same kind of commitments for other locations - there was always at least one location to prepare, one that was shooting and one that was being reinstate and all between 20 and 100 miles away from each other. And to rub salt in the wound on every day I'd pass through the one town where we could have filmed everything and where we ended up filming nothing.

A recce trip prior to filming took three days to travel around and they failed to complete that on schedule. By the second week of filming I'd clocked up 5000 miles darting back and forth between locations and spent most of my working time in lay bys catching up on missed calls and leaving messages for other crew who inevitably were driving between locations all the time - some days I was spending 8-10 hours of a 12 hour working day just driving. By the end of the shoot I'd spent over £2000 on fuel and mine was just one of the 60-odd vehicles running around like this.

So with all these examples of money just waiting to be wasted, I feel the need to get into a business where people will pay me to do things wrong. (A service I usually "throw in" anyway)

🙂

@spekkie - they're called management consultants or sometimes 'change managers'.

It's great gig if you can get into it - you waltz in without knowing a thing about how anything works or why - avoid speaking to anyone on the front line, or their line mangers - stick to the board, makes things easier - ask them what they want - invariably "oversight" "management information" "reduced costs" "increased productivity" - this means "make sure I can tell if anyone isn't working hard enough, make my job easier, do more, with less".

Then recommend a plan which means anyone actually making money for the company spends 25% of their time doing their job and 75% of their time telling the board what they did using systems and procedures which make perfect sense on a PowerPoint as long as your audience only wants the above and has a hypothetical knowledge of how their company actually makes money and then impose it without asking for input or feedback - to a workforce who'll have to work around it, rather than with it - but won't say as much through fear of being labelled as "not a team player".

Then ask for £20,000 for your efforts - if you face any static after the deed is done, just remember "I'm sorry sorry but British workers are fearful of change and grown lazy - off shore it"

In the 90,s worked at refreshing nhs Gp surgeries, the computers where still starting to arrive and patients notes being put on them, if we needed the screens or cables moved wwhere not allowed to touch them or read what was on the screen, so a chap had to come out disconect the thing after switching it off , we drilled and he repeated the above in reverse order at 60 quid a go.

Then there is a block of flats i worked at,i advised removable rails accross large opening windows to be used as fire escapes, the window company used wardrobe rails and their fittings,totally unsafe but as they had been paid for they had to stay and residents had to be careful, even though residents where never told of the dangers.

Local council o save cash used internal hollow core doors on exterior frames eg rear doors on houses to save cash, some neferious residents relised and soon kicked in a theif sized hole, council then refused to replace them as it was theft, and should be covered by residents insurance