Cisco

Cisco Systems is recognized as a leader in its field. It is aggressive in maintaining, reinforcing, and developing new positions of leadership, and has the financial wherewithal to do it. Cisco encourages employee development and provides plenty of opportunities for professional improvement through classes, knowledge-sharing, and on-line resources.

In my division, employees are essentially on call 24/7.

We do a good amount of fire-fighting (in other words, responding to emergencies that come up and are unpredictable).

There is a tendency to ignore issues that are not pressing until they become urgent.

There has been improvement in this area--planning and abiding by schedules in the face of interruptions and emergencies--in the ten years I have been with the division, but when push comes to shove, the old habits resurface.

Some of this may be due to chronic understaffing, but with the build-up of teams in India, the understaffing is less of a problem.

We try to be very responsive to customers, but as the pool of customers in our case consists of a small number of large customers, being customer-driven can lead to sudden changes in priorities and feature creep into products and development cycles.

It's been suggested that rather than be so customer-focused and driven, we should lead the way in product development and innovation so that customers will want the products we develop, but we don't seem to be able to do that.

It has also been the case that management will try to promote good practices by training everyone in some new method (of time management or work planning), but after the initial push, the effort is abandoned and management support for the new methods seems to vanish.

We are schedule-driven no matter how unrealistic the schedule, and it's only when the true scope of the work becomes impossible to ignore that schedules (with management, with the customer) get renegotiated and start to resemble reality.

The problem is always one of how to meet a very aggressive deadline.

Be aware of the negative impact at the lower levels of the hierarchy of frequent changes in direction or priority. Minimize thrashing in plans and schedules. Promote realistic schedules from the outset of projects to reduce stress on employees.

Lengthen vacation time and make it easier for employees to take time off without pay.

Encourage people to voice unpopular or "politically incorrect" views. Foster an atmosphere of openness and discussion at the lower levels.

Stop emphasizing "frugality" as a core value; frugality can be interpreted as exploitation. Emphasize efficient use of resources instead.