Policy-makers need to eat their own dog food

For the six months, some policies have been passed in my company which has greatly inconvenienced us. The workload ballooned but the manpower shrunk. It's pretty frustrating at times, having to jump through hoops to do some simple things. It's even worse when you have to jump through hoops to do what I think are stupid things. And just because you've jumped those hoops before, they think it is ok for you to jump through another set of hoops, because they ASSUME you can do it again. But it isn't the same set of hoops. This time they're barbed and set on fire and you need to jump through them twice as fast. But hey, they say, hoops are hoops. Yeah, it's not called a dog's life for nothing.



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Eating your own dog food

Still on the subject of dogs, policy-makers need to eat their own dog food. What, no proper meal? Not even a slice of Gardenia? Well, I'm not exactly suggesting that we feed them dog food, though I have a fantasy of stuffing it down their throats at times. As Joel Spolsky explains,

Eating your own dog food is the quaint name that we in the computer industry give to the process of actually using your own product.

Eating your own dog food is an important process during policy formulation. It is as someone said, it's nothing to them if they can't feel the pain. When they feel the kind of impact their policies will cause, hopefully they will be more discerning and refine them. Something like what HDB's CEO and senior managers do:

At the Housing Development Board (HDB), its chief executive officer and senior managers lead by example in addition to rewarding and publicising good service performance. During its annual Quality Service Day, for example, they will personally man front-line counters at HDB Hub and branch offices.

Knowing how your dog food comes about

This deals with the implementation of a policy. By that I mean mean that policy-makers should communicate with people who implement them. It's like if you're getting the same old brand of dog food all the time, don't expect that special can of mint-flavoured dog food with cherries in it to have the same kind of availability. In other words, don't dismiss that just it's just a piece of ice floating on the water when there could be an iceberg underneath. Don't set deadlines according to your own whims and fancies or some unfounded assumptions when you can check with those who know the ground conditions better.

 Change is not always the constant

In the end I guess it's difficult to change the mindset and the culture of those policymakers I'm referring to. I guess this problem will continue to dog me.