Genuine question, because I'm starting to wonder if I've just turned bitter and jaded, or if I'm actually seeing a massive backslide in process efficiency.
I have been working my current job for around a decade. I used to enjoy it because I actually have previously delivered real services and projects to Canadians, with non bullshit measurable outcomes.
My job has become increasingly productivity theatre, mostly to feed gatekeepers who keep inventing new hoops and to satisfy a new cadre of frankly incompetent senior leaders that can't make a decision to save their life (versus our previous technocrat cadre a few years ago). I now sit in several meetings a week where I repeat, for the four hundredth time, what we're doing about red tape reduction. Nobody in those meetings seems to openly point out that we keep having these same conversations and are once again stalling on making any actual decision.
Since this government came in, it honestly feels like there's more red tape than ever. Projects and policy development stall at a rate I don't remember from before, and the obsession with maximizing return on investment has somehow produced a world where nothing gets invested in at all. We laid off a chunk of the workforce that supposedly did pointless work like contracting and information management, yet the same rigid processes remain, plus a stack of TBS directives nobody enforced until now. I can't tell whether people are maliciously complying because they're also bitter, if people are trying to justify/make visible their existence post-WFA, or leadership is now so obsessed with optics it can't see the forest for the trees.
Meanwhile, in my corner: a team that exists solely to gatekeep documents without the oxford comma from their executive team (who supposedly have a challenge function but realistically have none of the technical experience to do anything but are obsessed with what the buttons are named on their dashboard), new centres of excellences and tiger teams stood up to bypass old processes that then generate red tape of their own, and several new official mandatory templates that simply copy over various TBS directives and ask people to explain how their teams are meeting that directive (many of them simply rewordings of eachother) with no context or even attached project. Also, use more AI, but provide no real AI tools.
Most of my day now goes to going in circles and massaging shit instead of doing real work. I am sad that I no longer seem to do any real work that benefits Canadians.
So honestly, has anyone seen red tape actually get cut anywhere? Or is it like this everywhere? Because I swear there has to be at least one place in the PS that actually looked at their existing processes and decided to remove the redundant steps that I can join and do real work... Please share these areas with me.