Riding the wind of rebirth

"Afterwards, we sorted out the situation and found that the computer room did have dual power supply at the beginning. However, during a computer room renovation, the neutral line of one line could not be connected because it was not well considered during the design. In order to solve the power supply problem, the neutral line of the other line was shared with it."

"The plan was verbally reported by the electrician and approved, but it was only approved as a temporary plan. Because no documents were left and there were no supervision, termination, or improvement measures, the temporary plan became a semi-permanent plan, and the drawings still used the old drawings. After the maintenance personnel took over the operation and maintenance of the mobile phone room, they did not seriously implement the regular review, testing, and drills and other technical solutions. As a result, this problem was concealed and became a time bomb in production."

"It was not until our Clover Group's ISO team moved into the Blue Sky Sunshine Group and helped them sort out their systems, plan processes, re-prepare documents, and implement responsibilities one by one that many problems were exposed."

"The situation at that time can be described as shocking. We sorted out the areas that did not meet the requirements of the quality system. There were more than 60 areas where the system was missing, more than 70 areas where the staffing was missing, more than 70 areas where the responsibilities were not fully implemented, countless areas where the materials and plans were incomplete, and the test and verification workflow basically did not exist. There was basically no sampling, review, and summary before, during, and after the event. There was basically no emergency plan, or even if it existed, it could not be implemented."

"When this happens in an enterprise, it's not surprising that something goes wrong. On the contrary, if nothing goes wrong, it's because the employees are so self-conscious that they use their own energy to make up for the shortcomings of the system and management."

"For example, the potential failure of the computer room I just mentioned could have been avoided if strict control had been exercised in any of the dozen or so links from project establishment to acceptance, as well as in the subsequent regular re-inspections and emergency drills. However, it was precisely because of overstaffing that the dozen or so links that were drawn up were in vain, and each of them was in name only, which led to the failure lurking."

"This is definitely a management problem." Zhou Zhi said sincerely: "I don't know if the base also has similar problems. If so, we should definitely be vigilant. Regardless of whether we want to introduce the ISO system or not, we should establish a modern management system in five aspects: determination, resources, process, supervision, and responsibility."

"It's easy to make up your mind." Li Weigang and Zhang Weichao looked at each other. "There were two accidents in the past few years. The whole base was united. Everyone worked overtime to prevent inspections and prosecutions. The recent two consecutive successful launches cannot be said to have nothing to do with everyone's efforts."

"But to be honest, the method is not very scientific." Zhang Weichao said: "Many comrades have been working overtime for a long time, and we are also worried that problems will arise if they relax their enthusiasm."

"This is my second point, the resource issue." Zhou Zhi said: "In fact, this issue is closely related to the idea."

"For a long time, our enterprises have had a problem of focusing on production and neglecting management. They value the labor of workers but despise the labor of management, and even equate management with exploitation and oppression, pushing it to the opposite side of labor."

"This also means that when many effective and necessary management measures are introduced, they are often not understood by everyone."

"In fact, I think that the two most effective measures to improve labor productivity are technology and management," Zhou Zhi said. "So if science and technology are called the primary productive force, scientific management should be the secondary productive force." "Increasing investment in technology is now understood by most people, but increasing investment in management is often not worth investing in, not to mention the managed, but often even the managers themselves, or they think that it is enough to get by, and it is not worth striving for perfection like technology."

Li Weigang and Zhang Weichao were both startled. Zhou Zhi's last sentence was exactly what they were thinking.

"In fact, what I want to say is that both technology investment and management investment are very important to enterprises." Zhou Zhi said: "If there is a shortcoming in any aspect of the enterprise that restricts its development, it is necessary to quickly adjust and optimize it to make up for it."

"For example, the comrades you just mentioned have been working overtime for a long time to strengthen quality management, which in itself shows a problem." Zhou Zhi said, "It shows that the base has insufficient investment in quality management and insufficient means, so it can only use manpower working hours to fill the gap. Then we should think of ways and work hard in this regard, introduce excellent management tools, and release manpower again."

"Blue sky and sunshine, what management tools do they use?"

"Before, the introduction of the ISO quality management system brought a huge workload to the group's management work." Zhou Zhi smiled and said, "So we had to develop a set of programs to improve work efficiency. This set of programs connects our office system and development system to form a complete set of technology company process management system. The design logic of the system itself is based on the R&D process of general technology companies, and the ISO quality management system guides the operation of these logical processes. The three are organically combined, and we have also completed a series of management work such as human resources management, workload assessment, process progress control, product quality control, product version management, technical document collection and retrieval, and product submission."

"Later, when we were helping Blue Sky Sunshine Group implement ISO system control, we re-modularized and parameterized the system and separated out a set of application scenarios that were independent of Clover Group, but more professional, with modules and processes that customers could freely customize. This system is called the Quality Process Management System, or QPM in English."

"To be honest, if we didn't have this system, we wouldn't be able to complete ISO system management at Clover." Zhou Zhi explained, "The reason is very simple, because the previous Clover also focused on production rather than management, and technology investment rather than management investment. Everyone was saturated with their own production tasks."

"If we want to take management seriously, then the outputs that everyone needs to submit are no longer limited to products. We need to have a set of additional outputs that comply with the ISO system. For our software development, in addition to the program, we also need a requirements design specification, a system architecture specification, a technical development specification, a technical development manual, a system test manual, a functional test manual, a module test manual, a test case manual, a version specification, a version source code, a version target code, a system verification manual, a functional verification manual, a module verification manual, and a verification case manual."

"Each set of manuals must be handled by three people: compilation, review, and archiving. The increased workload is actually equal to or even exceeds the development workload." (End of this chapter)