Frank Dengler, who is the head of a small engineering department in a big engineering company, claims that he just makes the budget up; and that’s the joke.

Frank was threatened with disciplinary action after he was overheard joking with colleagues about the “yearly farce” called the  ‘FOP’ (Financial Operating Plan).

Frank said:”We just count how many people we have and multiple that number by the hourly rate.  Then we multiple that number by 1.5 as I know I’ll have to argue with the programs about what we’ve asked for.  After that, we add some sub-contractors in who’ve been here for ages: they’re like part of the furniture.  Apparently we need them because our own guys only know how to do spreadsheets and powerpoint now.

“After that, we just burn the money on whatever booking codes are available until someone complains.”

Frank went on laughing at the stupidity of it all: “sometimes in Quarter 4 we just get someone to manipulate all the bookings to fill up the gaps.  Nearly every year, around September time, we have to buy in sub contracting to spend all the money that’s allocated otherwise they won’t give us so much next year.  Once I hired them just to move boxes from one place to another and back again.”

“The thing it, it’s totally pointless because I have a fixed number of people.  I can’t moved them into other departments and I can’t get rid of them: our company is not that flexible. So in the end it costs what it costs.  We’re not managing anything with this kind of KPI.”

An employee of the finance department, John Smith, claimed that: “it is vitally important to know exactly how each Euro is spent.”  When asked why, John simply said: “if you have to ask you’ll never understand.”

didyouevermanagespaghetti.com.  This is satire; nothing here is true.