Keltham will now, striding back and forth and rather widely gesturing, hold forth upon the central principle of all dath ilani project management, the ability to identify who is responsible for something. If there is not one person responsible for something, it means nobody is responsible for it. This is the proverb of dath ilani management. Are three people responsible for something? Maybe all three think somebody else was supposed to actually do it.
…
In companies large enough that they need regulations, every regulation has an owner. There is one person who is responsible for that regulation and who supposedly thinks it is a good idea and who could nope the regulation if it stopped making sense. If there’s somebody who says, ‘Well, I couldn’t do the obviously correct thing there, the regulation said otherwise’, then, if that’s actually true, you can identify the one single person who owned that regulation and they are responsible for the output.
Sane people writing rules like those, for whose effects they can be held accountable, write the ability for the person being regulated to throw an exception which gets caught by an exception handler if a regulation’s output seems to obviously not make sane sense over a particular event. Any time somebody has to literally break the rules to do a saner thing, that represents an absolute failure of organizational design. There should be explicit exceptions built in and procedures for them.
Exceptions, being explicit, get logged. They get reviewed. If all your bureaucrats are repeatedly marking that a particular rule seems to be producing nonsensical decisions, it gets noticed. The one single identifiable person who has ownership for that rule gets notified, because they have eyes on that, and then they have the ability to optimize over it, like by modifying that rule. If they can’t modify the rule, they don’t have ownership of it and somebody else is the real owner and this person is one of their subordinates whose job it is to serve as the other person’s eyes on the rule.
…
Cheliax’s problem is that the question ‘Well who’s responsible then?’ stopped without producing any answer at all.
This literally never happens in a correctly designed organization. If you have absolutely no other idea of who is responsible, then the answer is that it is the job of Abrogail Thrune. If you do not want to take the issue to Abrogail Thrune, that means it gets taken to somebody else, who then has the authority to make that decision, the knowledge to make that decision, the eyes to see the information necessary for it, and the power to carry out that decision.
Cheliax should have rehearsed this sort of thing by holding an Annual Nidal Invasion Rehearsal Festival, even if only Governance can afford to celebrate that festival and most tiny villages can’t. During this Festival, the number of uncaught messages getting routed to Abrogail Thrune, would then have informed the Queen that there would be a predictable failure of organizational design in the event of large-scale catastrophe, in advance of that catastrophe actually occurring.
If literally everybody with the knowledge to make a decision is dead, it gets routed to somebody who has to make a decision using insufficient knowledge.
If a decision can be delayed … then that decision can be routed to some smarter or more knowledgeable person who will make the decision later, after they get resurrected. But, like, even in a case like that, there should be one single identifiable person whose job it would be to notice if the decision suddenly turned urgent and grab it out of the delay queue.
Thanks for posting this extract. I find the glowfic format a bit wearing to read, for some reason, and it is these nuggets that I read Planecrash for, when I do. (Although I had no such problem with HPMOR, which I read avidly all the way through.)
Spoilers for planecrash (Book 2).
“Basic project management principles, an angry rant by Keltham of dath ilan, section one: How to have anybody having responsibility for anything.”
Thanks for posting this extract. I find the glowfic format a bit wearing to read, for some reason, and it is these nuggets that I read Planecrash for, when I do. (Although I had no such problem with HPMOR, which I read avidly all the way through.)