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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Icy_Pineapple_8014 on 2024-06-11 17:08:49+00:00.
I'm not 100% sure if this clears the bar for malicious compliance or whether it's just senior management suffering the outcome of their own decisions.
I was a project manager working in a multi-million pound business where the single use products were typically $100k+. The items typically sat in store for decades until required or they eventually became life expired and had to be disposed of.
My remit was a slightly unusual one within the company as I was responsible for the post delivery support, for which there wasn't a great deal of need given the nature of the items. The bulk of the work was taking randomly selected units out of store and destructively testing them to check that they were ageing as expected and inferring from those results that all the rest of the stock were still sound and fit for use, if required in an emergency.
However, very occasionally items did get damaged during storage, special tools were lost, or someone drove a very heavy tracked vehicle over them. Our group was tasked with servicing these small value orders.
To enable us to do this, one other person and I were authorized to produce quotes up to a value of $1k without us needing to go through the full commercial approval process. We just had to keep the Sales and Finance depts informed. Oversight was maintained when/if the quote was accepted and a formal purchase order raised.
The full approval process was designed for the main company tenders and required a detailed breakdown estimate of manhours and bought out equipment, a cashflow analysis, risk register, milestone payments etc. etc. The value of these contracts was usually in the tens of millions, and hence required a formal review and sign off by the MD or Finance Director as a minimum.
The MD of our firm moved on to greater things within the corporate group, and rather than promote from within, corporate parachuted a new guy in who was known to be hot on financial control. One of his very first acts was to cancel my ability to sign off minor orders. Instead he insisted that they go through exactly the same process as everything else, which I could sympathise with, but the datapack required was completely and utterly over the top for our minor orders.
We did petition the MD to be allowed to produce a streamlined datapack and a relaxation on Director level sign-off but this was rejected. It was at this point that we may have drifted into malicious compliance.
We started to produce the full datapacks for every little order, as required. We did however conciously make no attempt whatsoever to group like items together or encourage customers to do the same. We made no attempt to make the new edict work in any sensible way. Instead everything was done separately. A customer needs a new o-seal because one has split or been damaged? 12 page datapack detailing the whole shebang and then a meeting with the MD or Finance Director to obtain sign-off.
It became an informal competition to see who generated the lowest value order requiring sign-off. I should also point out the standard terms of the existing support contracts precluded the costs of bidding being included in these orders.
I'd like to say that sense was seen and a streamlined sign-off process adopted, but it wasn't. The MD just told us to stop bothering him and rely solely on the Finance Director for sign-off instead. It was still going on over two years later when I left.