MY OPINION MATTERS COUNTING AND MOTIVATION 1979

My opinion for today starts with the premise that everyone can count, keep score, add numbers, report totals accurately, if provided with sufficient motivation. How many times over my life, when involved in Project work, was I handed a report, an inventory or an accounting of costs, hours, or manpower that was incorrect and not accurate. I might say for 35 years I experienced lack of attention to detail in more instances than not. I am talking some very obvious mistakes or oversights, 99% of which were due to inattention.

For example while in Peru I had all of the vehicles for our sector, that were not in use, needed repair or were unassigned at the time. These vehicles were parked on benches in a fenced lot above the sector warehouse facility. I used to maintain an inventory of these vehicles and have them counted every week. If I sent 3 people to count, land rovers for example, them I would inevitably, have at least 2 different totals and in some cases 3 different counts. Now we were dealing with 25 to possibly 40 vehicles at any one time. it should be pretty easy to keep track of.

In the warehouse system we were running a cardex (a manual inventory tracking record) of over 60,000 items. There were a roomful of clerks monitoring these cards. This meant adding to them as new goods arrived and deducting from them when goods were withdrawn to site. So I guess you can kind of get the drift. If we could not count Land Rovers then how in hell were we ever going to count the hundreds of thousands of pieces in the rest of the system. Well the short answer is we couldn’t. The inventory system was a disaster. I use this example only because the proof of my opinion comes from this very place. As I have said before this type of effort or lack of effort was found in many instances throughout my career. It used to make me rant, however now that I am out of the game it only irritates me moderately.

Even now, after retirement, I find occurrences of the same issue often. Playing my favourite game, golf, is a prime example of this lack of attention to detail. Finding two people that can tally the same totals after a day of golf with both of them keeping a card for the same group, is near impossible. There is always a discussion at the end. Further and very often over the course of a few minutes, the time taken to play one hole, someone inevitably forgets, miscounts or misrepresents their score on that hole. Go into a restaurant have your meal and shame on you if you don’t check your bill. Often there will be something wrong on it. Have a beer or two and look at the number of times the count is wrong. Shop in a grocery store and the same happens over and over again. Don’t check your credit card statements and you will miss finding an error.

Ok so where is all of this leading? Well my opinion is that people can count, track and report accurately if provided with the proper motivation. A case in point; back to Peru and that same group of people and inventory system that was in use for everything on the site. They were also in charge of explosives. We were on a tunnelling and canal project in the Andes Mountains so our life was basically blowing things up. Well explosives and blasting caps and all of the accessories came under the purview of the Peruvian armed forces. They were accountable to deliver it to us by truckload. And make sure none of it ever fell into the hands of the “Shindero Luminoso” or “Shining Path Terrorist” organization.

The explosive materials were delivered in trucks with heavily armed guards hanging out on every side. When they arrived at the site, they came into the office, took the guys responsible with them and went up to the explosives magazine to count and unload. At the magazine, they took an inventory of what was in stock and what had issued. This before unloading the new goods. Let me tell you in two years there was never a mistake in this inventory count.

My people could count 673,289 blasting caps to the single cap each and every time. Additionally, 4321 cases of 4 different grade of explosives, thousands of wire harnesses to the nuts and never ever have a mistake. The reason was, what happened if there was ever a mistake in the count and stock was missing. Those in charge of the magazine and his helpers were taken into custody by the army and never came back. I seriously doubt if they ever would have made it as far as a jail cell. They knew this also and were shit scared each and every time the army truck pulled up.

Therefore my firm OPINION is that anyone can count and report accurately when provided with the right motivation. What say you?