[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[George Herbert]

On 2/26/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> on 2/26/07 10:24 PM, geni at geniice at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > Knocking out even 10 of the hyperactives would lead to serious
> > problems unless you can find replacements (and if you can could you do
> > so now? The backlogs are getting anoying again).
>
>
> Are you saying that the quantity of the product is more important than the
> quality of the people? If so, that type of thinking is what has seriously
> contributed to the cancer in the culture.

This is a common operations problem - it's hard to say "we need to
slow down" when people start screaming that problem reports or issues
requiring resolution are backing up and not getting dealt with in a
timely manner.

It is, as far as I know, practically impossible to significantly slow
down operational responses in the process of resolving structural
issues.  It's almost always easier to make structural changes in a
nondestructive in-line manner, and work to diminish the inflow of
requests.

This is one of those organization-destroying growth phases, like the
"founder needs to hire a management team now and stop trying to do it
all directly himself" growth phase and the "we need to formalize
process now" phase.  You have to figure out how to respin the process
and policy in flight, or you tend to fall down and implode.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com