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Working On the Right Problem
By Timothy A. Wilson | June 7, 2008
In Boston, we have a bridge know as the Longfellow Bridge. It is in need of some major repair. In fact, right after the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis the state started looking into a number of bridges here in Massachusetts. Needless to say, they found that many of our bridges are in need of repair.
The case with the Longfellow Bridge is especially interesting considering the state spent $915,000 on a four month inspection but the state engineers will not sign off on the report from the engineering firm hired to do the inspection. It seems the state engineers feel the report from the consulting engineer company failed to take into consideration work currently being done and overstated dangers of the bridge.
According the Boston Globe, this one hundred year old bridge carries 135,000 commuters a day between Boston and Cambridge. If that isn’t bad enough the consulting engineering firm, felt that “the bridge’s deteriorated components could not shoulder the weight of a 64-ton Red Line train at the same time as heavy truck traffic.” The state engineers are in disagreement with this and feel the consulting engineering firm has overstated the case.
I don’t know but it seems to me just a bit foolish and people are not working on the right problem. One would think that the focus should be on getting the bridge fixed. With the amount of commuter traffic passing over this bridge it’s just a matter of time before a disaster strikes and we have our own version of the Minneapolis tragedy.
There is a lesson here for those of us who are consultants. We need to make sure we’re working on the right problem. It can be very easy for us to focus our processes and miss what it is we are trying to do for our clients. As consultants, we’re hired to provide solutions to problems. Our goal should be to provide value to our clients not pontificate on the cleverness of our processes.
We serve our clients better if we make sure that we are working on the right problem, we then can provide results that lead to outcomes and dispense with working on tasks. This allows us to add value to our clients and for them to see that we are providing solutions to their problems.
So, are you working on the right problem?
Topics: ACTing Right |
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