Just got the latest issue of the City Savvy, an in-house propaganda sheet electronic newsletter to city employees. (Edit: it was electronic only for a while as a cost saving measure, but they’ve gone back to printing it in full color now. Your tax dollars at work…) I occasionally read it when I need a cynical laugh. Why do I say that?
Well, every now and then, whomever the current mayor is at the time picks out a program that has been around for a while, slaps a new coat of paint on it to cover the prior mayor’s name, stencils in his own, publicizes it in Savvy and proclaims it to be the best thing since sliced bread. It ReallyWill! Save! You! (Tax) Money!!!!
This week, it’s the flex time program.
With his Flexible Workplace Initiative, Mayor Bill White is urging employers, including the city, to explore flex schedules to combat rush-hour congestion.
Yawn. First heard about it under Lanier. Then Brown resurrected it sometime in his first term. Now Bill’s claiming it’s his plan. Ho hum.
A flexible schedule gives city employees greater control over their work/family balance, said Lonnie Vara, Human Resources director.
Flextime comes in many forms: four 10-hour days per week; 80 hours over nine days in two weeks; “four nines and a four,� when an employee works nine-hour shifts four days a week and takes off a half-day; and remote work, also called telework or telecommuting, when an employee works from home. This option requires a particular type of job and a self-motivated worker.
Because the employee can work from home, he should be more productive, Vara reasons. “People want this benefit, so they will work harder to keep it.�
Right. When pigs fly. First off, the article conflates two different programs: Work at home, and flex time. Sometimes these can cross, but it’s not often.
Secondly, the big problem with flex time is that you have to be there when the job is. If that job is being a police officer or a fireman, then that employee has to be there when their shift dictates. No flex possible. If that job is nurse in a clinic, clerk in the city court, or something that requires recieving the public in person, then the employee has to be there in the hours that the public expects them to be there, and that’s generally 8-5, five days a week. So the only employees who can flex are “back-office.” But that has it’s own problems.
Thirdly, supervisors and even front-line employees who depend on the back-office people want to be able to talk to them. “We can’t complete that job because this is Jane’s flex day,” is not something anyone who wants to climb the corporate ladder wants to say. And few supervisors are comfortable with the idea of an employee they never see in the office so work at home is not popular with them.
White is talking to businesses and hoping enough employees throughout the city work a flex schedule that traffic will be reduced by at least 10 cars per lane every 15 minutes.
But the experiment only works if productivity stays the same or improves. After all, these are businesses.
No kidding. And if they’re businesses, they’ve probably already made up their minds about what schedule works for them.
The system White is encouraging includes performance measures and layers of personnel trained for the same job, ensuring that someone can take over the duties when the regular employee is off and that there’s a backup for the backup.
Well, that leaves the city out of it. We don’t have the staff to have a backup, let alone a backup for the backup. And to make it worse, in my section, fear of screwups has put so many extra layers of authorization and checks in the system that paper spends all of its time on someone’s desk waiting on signatures, rather than being acted on and filed. This just strains the system even more.
The City of Houston already has flex time; any office that could get off the 8-5 schedule pretty much is already. One office in our building works 7-4. Many field employees in Public Works, have a similar schedule, which is also designed to get them going out and coming back to the office/depot at times other than rush hour. This is important, as people like sewer inspectors may work out of a few centralized locations and have to travel across a substantial portion of the city to reach a job site. Less time in traffic = more work done.
So tell me, why does every mayor have to spend money, people, resources, and time on the same project?
City Moves to SAP.
Last April, City Council approved $22.7 million for SAP to replace the nine-year-old AMS Advantage program the city has been using for enterprise reporting.
The summer 2005 City Savvy reported SAP would change the culture of the city by standardizing ERP functions among departments and by breaking down information barriers. It will also align the city with computer systems that are widely used in the private sector.
I’m having to learn SAP for my job, but so far, I don’t see what all the hullabaloo is about. So we’re having to change our proceedures and policies to match a straitjacket that some company invented and convinced a lot of businesses to put on. Maybe as I learn more, I’ll be more impressed. Maybe. But I’m looking at the man hours we are investing into this changeover and I don’t see the effort paying off for years, if at all.
The new ERP will be implemented in two phases. On July 1, employees will use SAP to manage the purchasing and financial systems, such as budgets, grants, contracts, project accounting and procurement. During this phase, SAP should usher in faster delivery of materials, such as parts and office supplies, and knock down the walls of bureaucracy that have grown around departments.
Will it cure cancer? No? What about the common cold? Look, the only thing that can knock down the walls of bureaucracy are the bureaucrats in charge. And they’re going to insist on building them back up as fast as they can figure out how to gum up the system with their little fingers. Our procedures are incredibly paper oriented right now because the auditors insist on it. They fly through the halls in droves, like some lost, demented tribe of macaws. “Paper trail! Paper trail!” they screech. A hapless employee skips a step and they descend upon the unfortunate soul en masse, battering him into insensibility with their wings. “Paper trail! Audit! Audit! Paper trail!” (One says “Arthur Anderson!” but he is quickly silenced by the rest of the flock. It’s bad luck to invoke the fallen.)
Under the AMS Advantage program, each department has its own purchase approval process, which can require many forms and signature approvals. SAP will bring one citywide process. Purchases of less than $3,000 will require only one approval.
Riiiiiiight. And that will last until that one approval buys someone a fancy new gas grill for their home and then so many checks and balances will be built into the system, no one will be able to figure out how to approve a purchase ever again. It’ll be something like Heinlein’s “left-hand gate” test from Space Cadet. (note 1)
Bargain Basement
Next comes emergency preparedness, and for once, I’m not going to snark. I think the city did a damn good job here.
That’s what happened when Wes Johnson left a post-Hurricane Rita meeting at Houston Emergency Center.
In the wake of mass exodus realities, everyone remembered the images of sputtering vehicles with empty gas tanks adding to snarled traffic when millions were trying to leave the city at the same time. The gas stations were depleted without a way to get refueled. How might we be better prepared for the next big storm?
City vehicles: police cars, fire trucks, EMS and public works vehicles would all need gas in an emergency. An ambulance without gas is just a big metal box.
“We had one 5,000-gallon fuel transport available, plus a few limited-capacity portable fuel tanks,� Johnson said.
It was obvious that PWE would have to buy a fleet of fuel trucks and trailers. Johnson knew it would probably be prohibitively expensive, but started searching the Internet for fuel transports. He wasn’t optimistic, but then he came across federal surplus property for sale. Among the items were military fuel tanker trucks and fuel trailers. They were being auctioned or offered for sale at unbelievable savings, if the buyer was also a government agency.
I’d rather be good than lucky. And I’d rather be both than just one or the other.
Spending just $5,500, PWE purchased five fuel tanker trucks, each with a 5,000-gallon capacity and six 5,000-gallon fuel trailers.
“All we paid was the $500 administrative fee for (each of) those trucks and trailer,� said [PWE fleet maintenance assistant director Carl] Bowker, an Army reservist. “The trucks normally run about $81,000, and the trailers $15,000 each.� He estimates spending an additional $2,000 each getting the tankers in tip-top shape.
Talk about a sweet deal! As a federal taxpayer, I’m outraged over the waste of my tax dollars. As a city employee and taxpayer, I’m thrilled over the savings. Does that make me outragously thrilled? Or thrilled outrageously? Whatever.
Another major hurricane concern is the loss of electrical power, which is essential for water production and wastewater treatment, Johnson said.
Johnson said that Bowker also found trailer-mounted generators on the federal Web site. “One was huge, capable of lighting two city blocks.�
PWE purchased that 1,000-kilowatt generator for $500. Then Bowker brokered three truck tractors, normally $245,000 each, for $500, to transport it to where it might be needed. “We have continued procuring generators for the utility division water and wastewater branches along with medical supplies for the Health Department,� Bowker said.
Referring to the government contract, Bowker said the cost of new equipment would be more than $1.5 million. The city paid $7,500.
That’s right. $7,500 instead of $1,500,000.
His Internet diligence won Johnson $2,500, the maximum award from the Employee Suggestion Program, which awards money to employees making cost-saving suggestions that the city uses.
You know, just this once, I don’t think I’m going to snark about the bonus program. I said last year that Houston was far better prepared for the worst than New Orleans, and people like this are why. While New Orleans dithers over the liabilities of using school buses to evacuate people, Houston gets busy.
Job well done, Wes.
————————————————————–
Note 1: It was a mental/physical coordination test which required the subject to quickly pull the correct lever to send a ball through one of two gates, based on the signals given by a complicated set of bells, whistles, buzzers, and lights. The subject scored or lost a point depending on whether his decision was right or wrong based on the stimuli. The instructions were very, very thorough in describing the rules for exactly which gate was to be selected, but they were also quite verbose. Some stimuli could not exist simultaneously, which simplified it. In fact if you worked your way through the entire tortuous page of instructions, you’d realize that all the conditions were contradictory, and there was no logically possible condition under which either gate could be selected! Impatient cadets would quickly get tired of trying to understand the lengthy rules, assume they had the gist from the first few sentences and start playing. Of course, no matter what decision was made, it was always wrong!
It was, I thought, an ingenious way to weed out people too stupid to RTFM. Certainly not the type of person you’d want in space. Heinlien was pretty cute with the tests in that novel; the “peanut in the soft-drink bottle” was another classic piece of misdirection.