Apologies for organisations caught up in this generalisation but my experience sadly over the past 10 years or so is that by and large organisations have almost no quality control. Ironically at the same time, many organisations have achieved quality certification by standards bodies to 'prove' their quality but it truly isn't worth the paper it is written on.
Virtually everybody I deal with other than paper shops and possibly supermarkets seem to lack the very basics of quality control. Let me sum up quality in a simple sentence, "Quality control doesn't imply that you do not make mistakes but it does imply that they are only made once".
A few examples. Chasing a bank for 3 weeks for a bank card. After the first failed order, a process should have been kicked off and should have taken a very short period of time: was the card ordered incorrectly? Did the system lose the request? Was it sent and didn't arrive? This is major for a bank and should have been resolved, never to surface in the same way again. Quite obviously, nothing whatsoever was chased up, it was put down to a glitch and then it happened again and again. Halifax - hang your heads in shame.
Utility warehouse, I emailed in to change my direct debits and got a reply. Next month, the wrong amounts are taken so I call again and the old, "apologies Mr Briner.." of course, the same thing happens and I have to call again. Similar issues to the above.
It seems that every time I call a bank (I deal with 3), a utility company and just about anyone else larger than 5 people I assume that it will not work as expected, I assume a lack of quality. I am not interested in apologies that mean nothing and quality insurance that does not result in quality proves that as a company you do NOT understand what quality management is. Do these CEOs not understand? Are they inept? Do they employ incompetent quality management and then not have quality management of their own to notice this? Do they accept mistake after mistake and not have a problem with it? Do they not ask why 50% of calls to call centres are about mistakes?
For goodness sake people, can somebody not sort this out. Can we not insist on managers that can manage and quality managers who understand quality? This sort of stuff affects people's lives directly and to be honest will cause people to emmigrate to countries where people take their jobs seriously!
Friday 23 October 2009
Thursday 22 October 2009
The knowledge of good and evil
Have you ever wondered what that whole Genesis thing is about? You know the bit where because of their disobedience, Adam and Eve receive the knowledge of good and evil. Why is this bad and what did this cause?
Well Adam and Eve's problem was that they either a) Didn't really trust God when he told them to leave the tree alone or b) They thought they could handle being disobedient (sound familiar).
Anyway, they disobeyed and what they received was autonomy, rather than have to rely on God for direction and discernment, God gave them the ability to discern and direct themselves. Not much changed there over the years. What we now have is the ability to decide what is right and what is wrong. That doesn't sound too bad except of course, that mechanism, as correct as it is, relies on an amount of knowledge about the situation - knowledge we rarely have.
For example, suppose you are a judge in court and somebody comes in for a serious burglary and you have to sentence them. You might well decide that the person seems sorry for what they did and give them a light sentence. With the best of your knowledge, this seems fair and square. A different judge however might decide that it is 'right' to make an example of them because the crime was serious. Note here that neither person is necessarily wrong. We would call this a grey area.
In life, we see this all the time. Debates, arguments and politics are all confused and corrupted by the simple fact that one person's right is another person's wrong (as well as deliberate and malicious intent). So we end up with what looks like an unwinnable situation. It is not a matter of simply saying, "It is up to person X to decide" because if we feel strongly enough that they are wrong, we feel the need to object as the numbers of Court appeals show. The best we can hope for is a strong consensus among people.
Well for believers, we have another recourse. God is still alive and kicking and He actually knows all of the factors. If He were judge, we would decide the correct sentence knowing exactly whether the person is sorry and whether the example would work on other people. What do we need to do then? Very simply, we need to defer most of our judgements and decisions to God and let the Spirit and the Bible direct what we decide. This is the nearest we will ever get to impartial judgement.
Well Adam and Eve's problem was that they either a) Didn't really trust God when he told them to leave the tree alone or b) They thought they could handle being disobedient (sound familiar).
Anyway, they disobeyed and what they received was autonomy, rather than have to rely on God for direction and discernment, God gave them the ability to discern and direct themselves. Not much changed there over the years. What we now have is the ability to decide what is right and what is wrong. That doesn't sound too bad except of course, that mechanism, as correct as it is, relies on an amount of knowledge about the situation - knowledge we rarely have.
For example, suppose you are a judge in court and somebody comes in for a serious burglary and you have to sentence them. You might well decide that the person seems sorry for what they did and give them a light sentence. With the best of your knowledge, this seems fair and square. A different judge however might decide that it is 'right' to make an example of them because the crime was serious. Note here that neither person is necessarily wrong. We would call this a grey area.
In life, we see this all the time. Debates, arguments and politics are all confused and corrupted by the simple fact that one person's right is another person's wrong (as well as deliberate and malicious intent). So we end up with what looks like an unwinnable situation. It is not a matter of simply saying, "It is up to person X to decide" because if we feel strongly enough that they are wrong, we feel the need to object as the numbers of Court appeals show. The best we can hope for is a strong consensus among people.
Well for believers, we have another recourse. God is still alive and kicking and He actually knows all of the factors. If He were judge, we would decide the correct sentence knowing exactly whether the person is sorry and whether the example would work on other people. What do we need to do then? Very simply, we need to defer most of our judgements and decisions to God and let the Spirit and the Bible direct what we decide. This is the nearest we will ever get to impartial judgement.
Wednesday 21 October 2009
Creating God in our image
I realised the other day that many of our problems, both for Christians and people who don't follow Jesus, are caused by not knowing who God is. We effectively model Him in our image. We take our far from perfect humanity and make it a few thousand percent bigger. What we end up with is a large version of ourselves with all the insecurities, the boredom, the impatience etc and this makes it hard to understand what He is like. Since everyone in the world would do this in a different way, we end up with 6 billion versions of God even though He is one.
To understand God, we need to understand His character from first principles, from the Bible. As we read about Him and learn what He is like, we then see ourselves as broken vessels modelled in the image of God but with defects.
Imagine you owned a car worth £50. Busted seats, an engine that burned more oil than petrol and loads of rust. If someone told you that there was a Rolls Royce worth £200,000, you wouldn't imagine an expensive version of the same thing. You wouldn't think that for your money, you get more oil burning, more busted seats and more rust patches. In short you would not create the Rolls Royce in the same image as your cheap car. This would be obviously incorrect and illogical, it would lead to all kinds of strange conclusions about cars. Imagine however if you saw the Rolls Royce or at least had it described to you and then realised that your car was a broken cheap version of the Rolls. This would make much more sense, it would logically make sense and most importantly, it would give the Rolls Royce all the honour and credit for what it actually is.
To understand God, we need to understand His character from first principles, from the Bible. As we read about Him and learn what He is like, we then see ourselves as broken vessels modelled in the image of God but with defects.
Imagine you owned a car worth £50. Busted seats, an engine that burned more oil than petrol and loads of rust. If someone told you that there was a Rolls Royce worth £200,000, you wouldn't imagine an expensive version of the same thing. You wouldn't think that for your money, you get more oil burning, more busted seats and more rust patches. In short you would not create the Rolls Royce in the same image as your cheap car. This would be obviously incorrect and illogical, it would lead to all kinds of strange conclusions about cars. Imagine however if you saw the Rolls Royce or at least had it described to you and then realised that your car was a broken cheap version of the Rolls. This would make much more sense, it would logically make sense and most importantly, it would give the Rolls Royce all the honour and credit for what it actually is.
Monday 12 October 2009
The wonderful Sell-Off government
The government have announced they are selling off assets to gain £16 billion pounds "in an effort to reduce the growing budget deficit". Wonderful, wonderful idea. Oh, did I forget to say the man is a total idiot (Gordon Brown). Now I do not have a degree in economics or a related subject and only know a 'pub quiz' amount about governments and how they work but I again feel I have to spell out to these people the folly of this idea. It is this government who has been overspending for the past 15 years. Why make some terrible gesture like it is the "economy's fault" that this has happened. Anyway, down to details.
1) The amount to be raised is small pickings compared to the actual deficit.
2) The obvious answer when outgoings minus income is positive is to reduce your outgoings or to increase recurring income (or both). Raising cash is VERY short-term and does absolutely nothing to fix the underlying deficit. If you borrowed money because your gran was about to die and leave you something then it might make sense but why raise cash just for the sake of it?
3) Selling assets if they are not required is surely something you should do anyway? If you have a spare town hall somewhere, why not sell it and then you do not need to maintain it.
4) If you sell something like the Dartford crossing, you get cash into government but of course the travelling public will pay for it - the cost to run the bridge will not go down so add in some profit for a private company and q.e.d. the charge will go up. You might as well put tax up on fuel and sting everybody!
5) They sold gold before and it bought them nothing.
They haven't learned anything. They are robbing the country and not improving, I like the way one BBC viewer sais, "he has sold the family gold and is now selling the silver". Why does it take 15 years to realise you can't spend more than you have? Are they really that incompetent? This is really, really, really basic. Are they telling us to save, not borrow and then have a deficit of how ever many billions? That is a deficit, that means borrowing money (which incurs interest) because you are spending more than you earn. Why can't the queen invoke some ancient power to dissolve government and have done with it?
1) The amount to be raised is small pickings compared to the actual deficit.
2) The obvious answer when outgoings minus income is positive is to reduce your outgoings or to increase recurring income (or both). Raising cash is VERY short-term and does absolutely nothing to fix the underlying deficit. If you borrowed money because your gran was about to die and leave you something then it might make sense but why raise cash just for the sake of it?
3) Selling assets if they are not required is surely something you should do anyway? If you have a spare town hall somewhere, why not sell it and then you do not need to maintain it.
4) If you sell something like the Dartford crossing, you get cash into government but of course the travelling public will pay for it - the cost to run the bridge will not go down so add in some profit for a private company and q.e.d. the charge will go up. You might as well put tax up on fuel and sting everybody!
5) They sold gold before and it bought them nothing.
They haven't learned anything. They are robbing the country and not improving, I like the way one BBC viewer sais, "he has sold the family gold and is now selling the silver". Why does it take 15 years to realise you can't spend more than you have? Are they really that incompetent? This is really, really, really basic. Are they telling us to save, not borrow and then have a deficit of how ever many billions? That is a deficit, that means borrowing money (which incurs interest) because you are spending more than you earn. Why can't the queen invoke some ancient power to dissolve government and have done with it?
Friday 2 October 2009
Average Speed Cameras and Road Safety
I was thinking of writing to my local MP about the standard of driving on the roads. I don't drive a massive amount, mostly just to work and back (20 mile round trip) but I do notice that there is a lot of shoddy driving. There is a basic problem with our system. The Driving Standards Agency run the Driving Test but people can keep taking it until they are lucky enough to scrape past and then that's it. They can drive any car they want (or can insure) pretty much forever. If they are bad drivers, it cannot be picked up until they have a serious accident and even then, not necessarily. In America, the land of the free, you have to take regular tests to renew your licence, something which although might be annoying is the minimum you could do to ensure people are safe drivers. Other things you could do is limit the number of tests somebody could take in one year or perhaps have an extended test for anyone who either fails too many times or fails in a major way.
I then came into work and saw that Wales are planning on using more mobile average speed cameras. Now generally we cannot complain about equipment that enforces the law but I want to compare two scenarios, one based on what I see on the roads and the other based on somebody speeding in Wales.
1) Mr A drives at an average of 40 mph in a 30mph limit at night when there is no other traffic or people around: Fined £100 and given 3 points. Insurance is increased because they are 'dangerous'
2) Mr B overtakes on blind corners, drives too close to the person in front, uses their handheld mobile while driving, doesn't indicate, straight-lines the roundabouts, pulls out very close to people causing them to slow down, doesn't really pay attention to what is happening around them and drives in an agressive manner although within the speed limit: Nothing at all. No fine, no points, no conviction, no insurance increase (unless you are the 1 in 50000 people who actually get caught by a police officer).
That is the problem I have with Police Policy that is aimed almost entirely on speed and speed cameras. Unless there are ways that the police catch general bad driving or put in a system that ensures that people at least know how to drive properly, there is a problem!
I then came into work and saw that Wales are planning on using more mobile average speed cameras. Now generally we cannot complain about equipment that enforces the law but I want to compare two scenarios, one based on what I see on the roads and the other based on somebody speeding in Wales.
1) Mr A drives at an average of 40 mph in a 30mph limit at night when there is no other traffic or people around: Fined £100 and given 3 points. Insurance is increased because they are 'dangerous'
2) Mr B overtakes on blind corners, drives too close to the person in front, uses their handheld mobile while driving, doesn't indicate, straight-lines the roundabouts, pulls out very close to people causing them to slow down, doesn't really pay attention to what is happening around them and drives in an agressive manner although within the speed limit: Nothing at all. No fine, no points, no conviction, no insurance increase (unless you are the 1 in 50000 people who actually get caught by a police officer).
That is the problem I have with Police Policy that is aimed almost entirely on speed and speed cameras. Unless there are ways that the police catch general bad driving or put in a system that ensures that people at least know how to drive properly, there is a problem!
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