On a lot of cop shows and movies, there’ll be a passing scene where the cops are looking for something. They’ll break in with guns cocked (usually someone is yelling “Go! Go! Go!”, demand everyone onto the floor and look for the bomb/drugs/contraband. When they don’t fight it, someone speaks into a walky-talky or their wrist or something and say “Blank not found. I repeat, blank was not found” (or sometimes “not intercepted”), and they charge on to the next destination of wherever they think it might be.
A couple months ago, FalStaff released a new report tracking system. This has five color-coded layers of importance (in ascending order of importance: blue, green, yellow, orange, red). Whenever a document goes red, we’re told to expect people breathing down our necks. Orange simply means we have to “walk it through” (hand it directly to the next person in the process rather than put it in their basket). When we do that, we set the report in the name of whoever we gave it to and they are the “owner” of the document.
Periodically, someone that requests a document go Red, but has that request denied (thankfully, some are aware that they can actually do it themselves), they will treat an Orange like a Red and you can expect visits ever ten minutes until you are done with it and pass it on to the next person to have someone breathing down their neck. Sometimes, mid-process, a document legitimately moves from Orange to Red, at which point we have the CIO, Willard, Jarvis, and the Account Manager all at our desks.
“Go! Go! Go!”
“Truman, we’re looking for document 684-122.”
“I don’t have it, I swear I don’t have it!”
“The report tracking system says that you do. Cough it up!”
“I just got back from giving it to Legal.”
“Document not found. I repeat, document not found.”
“Let’s go, team!”
{Down the hall} “Go! Go! Go!”
What document the world is so important that it has to be color-coded as to importance, then its location accounted for by the minute??
Talk about dependence on minutia…
Comment by Barry — May 17, 2005 @ 3:12 pm
These documents (particularly the legal contracts) can be pretty important… but no way important enough to pay the people that do them more than $9.50/hr or to correct them for future usage if it means going out of our way to do so.
The biggest reason behind the constant state of panic is that each and every account manager gets to be the hero to his accounts by promising that we’ll have their paperwork done pronto, so they promise our clients the world. All of them, naturally, think their clients are the most important.
Comment by trumwill — May 17, 2005 @ 4:02 pm
Sounds like our marketing managers - they’re each beholden to a different set of facility directors, department managers or hospital presidents. Each person up the chain thinks their advertising job has the HIGHEST, HIGHEST RUSH!!!! priority, so half the jobs they send our graphics department are all RUSH!! RUSH!! SUPERRUSH!!!
It got so bad the graphics services manager had to step in to regulate it. I mean, it was really bad at one time and I didn’t envy the designers.
Comment by Barry — May 18, 2005 @ 2:46 pm
The color-coded system was actually instituted in part because of that. Everything before was either Normal or Rush. Everything would progressively move towards the rush and we’d start having engrish-sounding “SuperMegaUltraRush!” Then everything would be shifted to normal. After enough rush creeps they decided to have more strict definitions as to what the different codes mean and a centralized way of finding out who ordered status-elevations. Theoretically, nothing can get elevated Code Red without the Cheif of Accounts’s (head of the AccMans) approval.
It took all of two days before I was kept after two hours to work on two Code Reds that weren’t due for a week. I think there’s a better way of going about it, but I doubt anything will come of it.
Comment by trumwill — May 18, 2005 @ 2:56 pm