The Electoral Register question has taken legs in a way I didn’t foresee. I’m used to the things I’m interested in being studiously ignored by the populous at large. Not ending up on the front page of the Indo.
However, fortunately I have been able to rely on my guide through the issue. Now I turn again to Daragh as he explains in plain language even I can follow why the Minister (and the suddenly-filled-with-energy County Managers) will find themselves in the same pickle in a few years if they don’t do the required thinking now.
The Electoral Register Emergency Rescue consists of fixing all the problems in the Electoral Roll. That seemed to me to be the right thing to do. But Daragh knew better. This, he explained, was the mortal sin of thinking that Scrap and Rework was going to solve our problems.
Who likes chocolate cake? Isn’t it a pain when your face gets covered in chocolate from mashing handfuls of cake into your gob? But you can wipe your face (usually in your sleeve) and carry on. That’s scrap and rework. A better solution is to wipe your face and take a smaller division of cake (a forkful). That is a change in the process based on an analysis of why you keep getting a chocolatey face, coupled with a scrap and rework task to set a baseline of cleanliness for your face that you will seek to maintain.
If I were working in a local authority, or was even in authority, I really would go along to his ICTEXPO thing on Friday and ask him to expound at further length.
2 Comments
Simon,
Captain Hook himself could count the number of elected officials or relevant government-bods who turned up on Friday on the fingers of his bad hand. (There were loads from Healthcare and the HSE- there is hope in that area at least).
The irony of that is that the Electoral Register was used as a hot-bun example for various issues as the best practice principles were explained.
Albert Einstein summed up the current risk best… “It is impossible to solve a problem at the level of thinking that created it”… those involved in the Electoral Register (with the exception of a small few I am in email contact with recently) haven’t taken the chance to raise the level of their thinking which will leave us all with chocolate on our faces come the elections.
[…] Here’s the link to them and here’s a trackback link to my comment to them re: ICT Expo… […]