Thread: Good Kiwi buggers making stuff.

Originally Posted by MassiveAttack

There is a difference between NZ and Chinese culture that does effect quality. I work with teams in both countries so am reminded by this every day. In China they will never miss a deadline so the main way they do this is by working as hard as it takes but when push comes to shove then quality can be compromised. e.g. we are building an appartment block and the concrete is not up to spec but rather than miss a deadline they will just carry on. Most of the time this is ok but occasionally the apparement building falls down.

In NZ doing what the boss says appears to be optional and nobody can make anybody compramise on the qualtity standard that the individual has decided they must adhear to. This means that when push comes to shove they miss the deadline and you have half a perfect thing.

An example would be the Clyde dam. They decided the hills around it were an earthquake risk so they execcede the inital budger by many orders of magnatude and stabalised the hills. I can guarantee that this didn't happen when they build the three georges dam.

Neither way is perfect but as the guy running those teams I would rather have the Chinese way as you can't run a business selling half a perfect thing. Also perfection is impossible to actually achieve in the real world so they key is to build things to agreed quality standards then the producer and the consumer gets what they are expecting.

Yes but they have a lot more dams and apartment buildings than we ever will. E.g 5 years after it fell down we will can't decide what to do with the christchurch cathedral so we still have a pigeon infested ruin.

Lucky for me we build software not dams so nobody dies when it goes wrong which is frequently. I follow Tikka7mm08's management philosophy.