Jamaica, The Land where Anarchy Reigns

Sometime ago I worked for a financial company and one night at around 3 AM the operations department encountered a problem with one of the applications. They followed procedure and called the software developer on duty to investigate. He logged into the system and proceeded to analyze and debug the application. Sometime after he identified the cause of the problem but then decided to fix it in production. Even though there was a company wide rule that strictly forbids developers from making changes to production code, in the production environment, without the approval of upper management. The problem was relatively minor, so he fixed it and went back to bed. I am sure feeling very proud of himself, basking in his brilliance. Probably thinking, what would they do without him?

By the time he came into work the next morning all hell was breaking loose and everyone was on the mother of all conference call. No one had time to be diplomatic about anything as they let the fucks fly freely. The main problem was even though the developer in question was successful at fixing the problem as it pertained to his application, he failed to perform a system wide analysis to see how his changes would affect the entire suite of interconnected systems. As a result of his change bad data was being disseminated everywhere and started affecting many of the trading platforms which forced the company to halted trading. While we all worked under extreme pressure to put in place a proper solution that would satisfied the needs of every subsystem that depended on the data. The company lost millions in both dollars and goodwill. He was fired on the conference call and a security guard was dispatched to immediately remove him from the premises… in tears.

The rule that developers were not allowed to change code in production without permission is a good rule. If you unleash your development staff on your production environment, it would be anything goes and anarchy would result due to lack of proper due diligence and poor communication. We can be one dimensional at times when we are in our zone.

What goes for a Computer System also goes for every system and the system of government is no exception to that rule. If Government ministers are allowed to do what they want, when they want to and how they want to, then it would be complete anarchy and the system would quickly grind to a disastrous halt. Rules, Regulations and Procedures are in place for a reason and that is to protect us from our self, to safeguard against human nature and to ensure business continuity.

If Rules, Regulation and Procedures are not followed, then maybe some good things might happen faster as a result but knowing human nature, a whole heap of bad things will happen. As was seen when regulations was removed from the American financial sector, anarchy ensued and all hell broke loose as the greedy bankers made up their own rules as they go.

Minister Richard Azan for whatever reason, good or bad, broke the rules, disregarded government procedures and took it upon himself to start a project. Then took it upon himself to hire a contractor and allow that contractor to collect rent from the finish project and like the software developer he must pay the price and should not be reinstated into the Government. I do not care which Political party he belongs to, nor do I actually care what PNP or JLP partisan diehearts have to say about it.

Too much Rules, Regulations, Policies and Procedures:

In the above I emphasized the need for Rules, Regulations, Policies and Procedures as a requirement for any system to operate properly. It is important that everyone understands the Rules, Regulations, Policies and Procedures and follow them, if the system is to realize its full potential. However there is such a thing as having too much Rules, Regulations, Policies and Procedures, so much so that it retards the fluent operation of any system and introduces too much Red Tape and Bureaucracy which also provides a platform for corruption to thrive. So, a healthy balance is required for optimal performance of every system.

I have worked in companies that have in place too much Rules, Regulations, Policies and Procedures. They were way too conservative when it comes to change. We had a computer software code that was never touched, once it was released into production. No updates and patches were applied fearing it would break the system. One manager I worked with implemented a core piece of third party software in 1989 but refused any attempts by the company to apply any updates to the production code. Maintaining the same code base for a decade but all hell broke loose when year 2000 came around because the Y2K version of the software had in it 10 years of changes. All the interfaces had changed, breaking backwards compatibility and the software was no longer compatible to all other interconnected systems.