Originally Posted by
Gargoyle
Just to take one example, the safety cards need to be replaced. NW and DL had different emergency procedures. When opening over-wing doors on MD88's, the DL procedure is to put the door on the seat. On the D90's, the NW procedure is to toss it out the window. I'm not saying either method is better- both have their advantages and drawbacks. But the former NW FA's are currently going through training to learn the DL methods, and these things have to be unified and made consistent. They can't train the FA's to do one thing and have the safety cards show something else, so the cards have to be replaced in the current time frame.
Good point, but I disagree. The cards are specific to each aircraft, so keep the ones that are there. They don't need to be redesigned if "times are tough"
Also, the people who repaint planes are not the same team that repaints the website, so you don't get the IT changes done any faster by delaying the livery conversion.
I agree with that statement. However, when DL execs say that the IT conversion costs were just too expensive to do it right, then that means they budgeted improperly.
Also, with the IT changes, there is a difference between just throwing more money at a project to try to get it done faster, and studying the ROI to see you can justify including a specific feature in that project.
Trust me, I'm insanely aware of that. That's my job. My counterparts at the other company would throw lots of money at projects, come up with fabulous reports, take forever to finish projects, and basically have the same retoric I'm hearing from DL. You don't throw just money into problems. My counterparts that are still around post-merger are astounded at how we do more with less. Before, their organization spent wasted more time and money avoiding problems or trying to just throw money at them and never cutting through the crap and just getting things done. They have more tools and can do their jobs better than before because we removed the wasting time and money culture and eliminated most of the politics and BS within the organization which was driving up cost and down productivity.
Funny story, not really related to above, other than its just a show of different cultures. While we were hashing out our IT conversion details... and they were outlining how impossible of a task it was to move a specific division... they were quoting all these numbers and statistics and server counts and things like that... trying to scare us with numbers. Their favorite number to scare you with was revenue tied to it. We don't dare touch that because that generates 1 trillion dollars per second so that'll take a few years to replace. Come to find out they'd spend all this time coming up with ways to avoid doing the work, hiring external consultants, etc... Half the time these stats were wrong, and, if you did your homework about the company you were buying you'd know that division doesn't make 1 trillion dollars per second.
I had one hancho give me a number, I ran it through my head and I stopped them right then and there. I said that's impossible. They replied, no that's how much revenue is tied to this so we don't dare touch it, it's got to stay the way it is, it'll take years and lots of money to develop a plan to convert it, yada yada yada... I said, you said it generates x per time period? Yes. I said, well that's very interesting, because, if you extend that out to an entire year, your entire division of the company doesn't make that in a year. I think your numbers are off, why don't you try again.
This person didn't like being asked these things because, well, they really had no clue what they were talking about, and they ended up leaving because our demand for actual work tended to interfere with their periodic golf outings with vendors during the business day.