QANTAS - WHERE TO NOW?

[Sunfish]

Please try a little to understand the QF management problem.

From my experience in bringing in new allegedly labor saving IT technology to companies, you face a very simple problem: If you have Twenty staff at the start, and the new technology allegedly takes Ten staff, then if you postpone the eventual redundancy to say, Six months after the introduction of your new system guess what happens?

Thats right. The system that was designed to take ten people to work it now takes Twenty people since everyone "burrows in" and subverts the system as they have a vested interest in the system not working as advertised. Furthermore the Three "change coordinators" - consultants that you hired temporarily to install and commision the system and maybe do a little training have "burrowed in" too and are now indespensible to your operation.

So the result is that instead of saving Ten staff you now added Three and there is no way you can make the system work without every effing one of them!!

The management solution prescribed to fix this problem is to fire all but the Ten staff you are supposed to need and tell them to make the new system work- or else. That means, among other things, changing work practices to suit the way the system works, not changing the way the system works to suit your current method of working, which is always disastrously expensive.

Now this system suits consultants and "know nothing" managers. It guarantees you will get something like what was promised in the glossy brochures, but you have no way of improving anything through experience.

This sounds exactly like what is being done to you - with the obvious major problem of the immoveable object of CASA regulation colliding with the infinite force of new technology.

The risk of course is that Qantas will cut too deep, as happened with Ansett, and lose control of the technical agenda, as did Ansett, with the end result of a major incident and a suspended AOC.

There is a better way, but that involves skilled and experienced managers, a consultative workplace style and a very different way of implementing new technology, but that is another subject.