No Excuses

My company has been behind schedule in engineering and production for several years now. Up until recently, we have been able to pull together for the really important projects and complete them close to on time. Things have gotten much worse for about the last six months and I have lost all faith that we can even complete one project on schedule.

Things really came to a boiling point recently when one of our regional sales managers called me out of frustration. He said that he was told one date one day and the very next day he was told that project would be a month late. He was confused as to what changed in that twenty-four hour period. I had to admit that I did not know. I asked around and nobody had a good answer so we decided to have an emergency meeting of department managers to figure out what could be done from this point forward.

I put together a list of fourteen items that I thought should be done to fix the mess. When I handed out the list in the meeting, everyone there was surprised that I had gone through that much trouble. They acted like they were shocked that anyone would put that much time into fixing the problem.

There was a lively discussion in the meeting and the excuses started to fly from everyone. I had to speak up a few times and refocus everyone back on our customers. I explained that there is no good excuse to our customers and the first thing we need to do is stop accepting excuses. Everyone agreed, but the excuses kept flying.

We had a follow-up meeting a few days later and nothing was solved. There were more excuses and not solutions. That meeting wrapped up with them inviting me to their weekly production meetings. I told them that I did not know if I could handle sitting through them if they were like these last two meetings. They asked me to attend again and I agreed.

I have heard rumors about how bad the production meetings are for several years. I attended my first production meeting yesterday and I was not dissappointed. There was excuse after excuse given by everyone in attendance. Nobody wanted to commit to any dates and there were no solutions given to any problem. Everything was done verbally because our production schedule does not track enough items. It was difficult to follow and I asked if the production schedule could be expanded to include more items. I was told that there is another schedule that tracks those items. Someone even volunteered to show me where it was.

I have to admit that my company is in worse shape than I believed it to be. I feel like this is partially my fault for not getting involved earlier. While I have nothing to do with production at all, I am a vital member of the company and one of the leaders of the management team. I can't let things continue down the path we are currently on our the company may not exist in a few years.