My first job that let me move around the building was as a reliability engineer in a missile assembly area where I learned that the way to enjoy a job, and be considered useful at the same time was to adjust the job so I would be comfortable with the things that interested me and I would be of the most value to the organization. I had discovered that most jobs are described by people who never actually perform them and have no idea of the reality involved. The layout of my job was to investigate problems found by the inspection and test functions during assembly and then classify the incidents as to seriousness, cause, and responsibility. With a code system I filled out these determinations on the bottom of a defect report. Then I was supposed to feed it to the IBM punch card system (obviously, this was a while ago) and go find another problem. However, I soon determined that nothing happened to this information after it went into the system except to be produced as a long, very heavy report for management to ignore.

So I began going to see the department I had determined to be responsible for causing the problem. This was pretty much limited to engineering, production, purchasing, marketing, and quality. Now and then the Navy, our customer, was the villain. There was always enough blame to go around.

When I visited them at the senior levels (although I certainly was not senior), I showed them the problem and asked what they wanted to do about it. I offered to help them gather information or take action or both. They were always pleased with the offer and usually were surprised that the situation existed at all. I learned a great deal by participating in their analysis and evaluation. They assumed that I already knew as much as they did so they let me in on everything.

The result of all this was that we routinely began to get rapid corrective action that actually eliminated the problems. I began to publish a regular list of problems and the actions taken. Everyone wanted to be listed on the page that said the action was completed. The part of my job involved with causing this action to happen probably took 5 percent of my time. However without that time investment, I would have just been another in a long line of frustrated trouble shooters. No action ever came out of that list of problems published by the card machine.

The result of it all was that I was promoted to another job where I could help others work in the same way. I immediately redesigned that job to make it more effective and interesting. All this was done by doing, there were no corrections made on paper.

Jobs need not be defined so that they are limited as soon as they brush up against something else. It is reasonable to encourage overlap and innovation as long as the effect is to help the process move toward success. Most jobs are laid out to be too small; none that I ever saw were too big. The more unimportant they are, the longer the description of their content.

© Copyright 1999 Philip B Crosby 

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