IBMs Problems:
- Countless reorgs/RAs have left people orphaned or absorbed into positions with titles that can’t be backed up with the modern skills or experience to match, and those people know how to play the Corp game well enough to stay low and quiet. So yes allot of dead weight especially in management. Lots of staff on paper but real work is being done by over burdened few that typically get burnt out and leave because the other resources have no idea of what they are doing but in pretending to they make projects 10x worse. But no one tells on them because IBM has earned it’s heartless don’t care about employees attitude fittingly so to their is nothing to gain by ratting on 60 yr old guy praying to make it to retirement before being found out or the 35 yr old software developer who has never coded but due to reorgs and consolidations they actually wind up these positions.
- Trying to find and manage #1 above leaders continuously imposes and mandate top down no exception initiatives, direction/tool/process changes that truly don’t fit everwhere abd destroy the productivity and moral of the great resources and teams already performing very well by penalizing them for the sins of the #1.
- They are so busy trying to prison guard their mysterious productivity problem related to #1 that the good people they do have become prisoners too.
- Upper level execs have no idea about what is really happening on the ground because mid level and lower level mgmt are afraid to tell them anything other than what they want to hear. One can b on a mission critical project with a challenging deadline.... Then a mandate comes down like “everyone must immediately do AGILE” or “all projects must use only cloud software and hardware”.... These sound fine right? But no one helps upper mgmt feel the impact of their decisions.... Like hey plugging in AGILE to our in flight project is going to add a month... Or some software in the cloud is buggy or features not available that are mission critical to the project.... That means the retooling to cloud and dealing w the glitches will add 3 months to a project ...... As soon as ground folks share the concerns they are met with “upper mgmt doesn’t care and wants the projects delivered on the orig time frame regardless of the new issues”. Multiply this x 10000
- Because of #4 leaders never truly understand the side effects of their decisions.... Imagine a 10 person team charged with making sure a particular internal business services is running, well maintained, documented and increasingly providing value to the customer ... Then 3 yrs later an RA hits and the team loses 4 people.... A yr later 2 more people.... So team is down to 4 but as time goes by new management of the team forgets the original team had 10 people, but starts to get complaints from other depts because the service isn’t reliable any more, or issues not getting resolved fast enough... And instead of communicating the real issue up the chain the now 4 person team is disciplined or scolded because they are no longer providing the same quality as 10 people did ..... This problem is huge ...
- IBM is just too big.... It’s too hard to govern in just one way... A single decision could help 60% of the company but unintentionally wreak unrecoverable havoc on the other 40%. Combine this with I’ll informed leaders making decisions/changes because that’s what their paid to do results in frequent sledgehammer being used when a scalpel was the right tool.
Someone made a great observation of the situation in the post @1eie+19Fce0Yw. However, the list of problems is much longer.