http://houblog.com/wp/index.php/2006/211 Random rants from a civil servant in Houston, TX Fri, 18 May 2012 03:00:50 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.5 http://houblog.com/wp/index.php/2006/211#comment-7884 Houblog » Blog Archive » Oh Really? Fri, 20 Apr 2007 22:51:06 +0000 http://houblog.com/wp/?p=211#comment-7884 [...] Last year, I wrote: Worse, it’s perfectly obvious that no one wants to know much about the misses, like why they happen, what kind of calls they were, or anything else about them for that matter. That’s a tactic that looks VERY familar to me, since I spent nearly 15 years under a management that engaged in it constantly. If you don’t have the information, you can honestly answer that you don’t have it. (The Assistant Director that told me that is no longer with the city. Thankfully.) The other half of the trick is to define your categories of information that you do keep in such a way as to be meaningless. Essentially, the numbers give a false picture because they’re measuring the wrong thing. Then bad budget and policy decisions get made with the wrong numbers, which means that even more “re-tooling” is necessary to keep the numbers looking good, and the next thing you know, you’re facing a disaster. My department is a multi-year recovery from that, driven in part by Mayor White’s performance initiatives, and partly by the changes in managment after the Great Retirement Slaughter of 2004. And some of the bad decisions made won’t be recovered from at all because they were capital expenditures and now we’re stuck with the results of such a poor decision-making process. [...] [...] Last year, I wrote: Worse, it’s perfectly obvious that no one wants to know much about the misses, like why they happen, what kind of calls they were, or anything else about them for that matter. That’s a tactic that looks VERY familar to me, since I spent nearly 15 years under a management that engaged in it constantly. If you don’t have the information, you can honestly answer that you don’t have it. (The Assistant Director that told me that is no longer with the city. Thankfully.) The other half of the trick is to define your categories of information that you do keep in such a way as to be meaningless. Essentially, the numbers give a false picture because they’re measuring the wrong thing. Then bad budget and policy decisions get made with the wrong numbers, which means that even more “re-tooling” is necessary to keep the numbers looking good, and the next thing you know, you’re facing a disaster. My department is a multi-year recovery from that, driven in part by Mayor White’s performance initiatives, and partly by the changes in managment after the Great Retirement Slaughter of 2004. And some of the bad decisions made won’t be recovered from at all because they were capital expenditures and now we’re stuck with the results of such a poor decision-making process. [...]

]]> http://houblog.com/wp/index.php/2006/211#comment-1630 Houblog » Blog Archive » A Curious Edit and Other News Thu, 03 Aug 2006 00:19:19 +0000 http://houblog.com/wp/?p=211#comment-1630 [...] Per Newsradio KTRH 740 AM, Jack (soon to be Julia) Oliver has accepted a transfer from patrol duty to a desk job as a supervisor at HEC. I bet that’s going to raise morale at the troubled facility. Oh well, it’s what I called for a couple of months ago: removal of this officer from patrol duty. HPD Deputy Director Craig Ferrell said the mutual agreement was made to allow Oliver a more flexible schedule so she can take time off for the surgical procedures over the next year. [...] [...] Per Newsradio KTRH 740 AM, Jack (soon to be Julia) Oliver has accepted a transfer from patrol duty to a desk job as a supervisor at HEC. I bet that’s going to raise morale at the troubled facility. Oh well, it’s what I called for a couple of months ago: removal of this officer from patrol duty. HPD Deputy Director Craig Ferrell said the mutual agreement was made to allow Oliver a more flexible schedule so she can take time off for the surgical procedures over the next year. [...]

]]> http://houblog.com/wp/index.php/2006/211#comment-242 Houblog » Blog Archive » Water Meter Failures: How Accurate Is Your Bill? Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:07:18 +0000 http://houblog.com/wp/?p=211#comment-242 [...] Lets get the worst out of the way: The program was ill-conceived, poorly planned, terribly executed, over budget, and has never worked as advertised. Inasmuch as it has caused numerous problems, resulted in many bill estimations, and caused hundreds, maybe thousands of man-hours per month to be devoted to correcting bills, and resulted in a great decrease in the public’s confidence level even before the story finally broke, it should be probably regarded as the single biggest failure in city administration over the last ten years, short of outright corruption. (Which is not to speak of any specific incident, just to say that I put malfeasance in a class seperate from mere incompetence.) Well, ok, it’s in the top two, anyway. [...] [...] Lets get the worst out of the way: The program was ill-conceived, poorly planned, terribly executed, over budget, and has never worked as advertised. Inasmuch as it has caused numerous problems, resulted in many bill estimations, and caused hundreds, maybe thousands of man-hours per month to be devoted to correcting bills, and resulted in a great decrease in the public’s confidence level even before the story finally broke, it should be probably regarded as the single biggest failure in city administration over the last ten years, short of outright corruption. (Which is not to speak of any specific incident, just to say that I put malfeasance in a class seperate from mere incompetence.) Well, ok, it’s in the top two, anyway. [...]

]]> http://houblog.com/wp/index.php/2006/211#comment-236 Houblog » Blog Archive » Generally Miscellaneous (and a correction) Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:31:52 +0000 http://houblog.com/wp/?p=211#comment-236 [...] Finally, a correction. (I’m doing a Chronicle here, and burying it on the back page. Ha.) I figured out a way the H.E.C. could be telling the truth about how expensive it would be to retrieve all those call records. You see, I was thinking in terms of the data being stored electronicly. But what the city often does is take the paper printouts of the reports containing the data in question and film them. Then record the immages on either microfiche or CD. In that case, it really would require printing out all the pages and manually collating the data (I would not trust an OCR program; they’re good but not perfect). [...] [...] Finally, a correction. (I’m doing a Chronicle here, and burying it on the back page. Ha.) I figured out a way the H.E.C. could be telling the truth about how expensive it would be to retrieve all those call records. You see, I was thinking in terms of the data being stored electronicly. But what the city often does is take the paper printouts of the reports containing the data in question and film them. Then record the immages on either microfiche or CD. In that case, it really would require printing out all the pages and manually collating the data (I would not trust an OCR program; they’re good but not perfect). [...]

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