Unfiltered Story #299102
This story: https://notalwaysright.com/you-dont-know-what-youve-got-til-its-gone/233370/reminded me of one of my experiences:
We had something similar to this happen where I worked . . . we had a regularly recurring audit that if failed could make us unable to legally sell our product, and people were ignoring the required actions . . .
The auditors arrived, and the first division came out okay because they were the newest division and used a different process.
Second division had horrible problems because they were ignoring closing the process, and they were hit for millions of dollars in fines.
Third division got hit for maybe a million dollars in fines . . .
Then they got to my division, the oldest one, and started digging . . . several weeks later they came to my group asking where we were hiding all the problem issues, because they <i>knew</i> we couldn’t have this few items! They were sent to me for an explanaion, since I’d been in charge of the preparation effort.
More than a year ahead of the audit, we’d realized that we had too many problems, so management assigned two experienced people and two interns to a “burn-down” team to reduce our numbers to a reasonable level. Somehow I wound up in charge of the team (probably because this was an expansion of one of my assignments) and started going through it oldest items first, and looking at every single one . . . we assigned the interns to screening the items, asking if this item could be closed or moved along, and then handing off anything that couldn’t to one of the two experienced people . . . We closed hundreds of items – most had actually been completed, but the paperwork hadn’t been completed correctly.
The auditors are asking questions, and I’m checking my notes and telling them what we’d done (though many items didn’t have specific notes if they’d been routine closures) . . . they finally produce a number and I look it up . . . “Okay, right away I can tell you this is screwed up- this number is wrong for <reason>, and this problem statement is poor, and this should be one of our items, but it’s assigned to <other division> . . . Let’s see, the number should be . . . OH! <i>This</i> one! <i>Where<i/> did you find this?!”
Auditor: “<Place> . . . Did you know about this?”
Me: “<i>Know</i> is a little strong – We <i>intuited</i> its existence. We had the counterpart, and knew this tag should exist too, but we coouldn’t find it. Now I know why . . . the basic number is wrong, the problem statement is weak – nearly bogus – it’s assigned to the wrong division, and the serial number is wrong too! See, we looked at every one of these in <our division> for a hundred numbers each way from the counterpart, and then all numbers across all programs for a hundred numbers either way, and . . . we missed it by five. It’s 105 numbers lower than the tag we knew about.”
A: “Oh . . . you did all that? And what did you do about it?”
Me, pointing at the notes on the screen: “Yep. We knew that it should be out there, but we couldn’t find it. We inspected the unit, determined the problem did exist, and had a new tag written, which we then worked and closed. Now I will return this to origination for correction, noting that the issue was worked per #12345, and they will either fix this tag and return it, or more likely they will verify that it was legally worked and close this as a duplicate. In either case, it will be legally closed.”
A: “um, yeah.”
For some reason they quit digging . . .
Oh, we did get a few findings, but no fines . . . we expected findings, it’s part of the process, partly to show that they did their job correctly.
