🚀 go-pugleaf

This article is from tektronix!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!fluke!kurt
 and was received on Sun Oct  5 02:04:57 1986
 
A person I know (who I must not name) worked at Rockwell on the space
shuttle program.  During that time somebody decided Rockwell was
defrauding the government and sent the GAO watchdogs down to see that
all those sleazy engineers were buckling down and spending taxpayer
money wisely.  Among the things they did was to study the engineer's
office to see who was at work and who was talking to his buddies and
going to the bathroom a lot.  Rockwell was very nervous that they
should look good for the GAO and this made a lot of tension in the
office which interfered with work.  However, the joke may have been on
the GAO.  The person rated by the GAO as the most effective worker was
a person who spent nearly all his time at his desk, with a pencil in
his hand.  What the GAO didn't notice, but the engineers knew, was that
this person had learned to sleep, at his desk, sitting up, with a pencil
in his hand.  

No organization of this type is without a certain amount of needless
waste.  However the audit failed to identify the items the engineers
agreed were the biggest misuses of time and money and also incorrectly
identified non-productive people as producers.  Performance monitoring
must be very carefully designed if it is to have any results at all.

Oh, Rockwell was not charged with any fraud it the shuttle program,
although the GAO did demand they generate more paperwork on what they were
doing, which further diluted their effectiveness.