Category: The Talent Stack

Posted on

Who’s the Boss?

I learned the difference between being responsible and being accountable long before I ever worked with data. I hadn’t yet turned 23 when I arrived at my first duty assignment as a newly-minted lieutenant. I was the battalion chemical officer, responsible for contingency plans if weapons of mass destruction were ever used. Part of my responsibility was inventorying and maintaining the detection and decontamination equipment for a unit of 400 men. This included some very advanced electronics with low-radioactive isotopes. In today’s dollars all of it could be worth well over a million dollars. If something happened to that equipment, my career was on the line.

I saw the same lesson play out again when I was a manufacturing engineer. In manufacturing, the plant manager owns the line. If scrap rates climb or a shipment misses its window, the conversation starts and ends with that person. The process engineers, the quality technicians, and the operators on the floor are the ones who actually change the set points, quarantine the bad parts, and rewrite the work instructions. They are responsible for the work. The manager is accountable for the result.

Data isn’t any different, though looking at most corporate data org charts, you’d think we were all stuck in a mid-80s Tuesday night primetime loop—constantly asking, “Who’s the boss?” line-item by line-item while Tony Micelli and Angela Bower debate who actually holds the title.

Continue reading “Who’s the Boss?”
Posted on

Going to Gemba

Source: Motor Trend (http://www.motortrend.com/news/miles-in-three-2013-honda-accords/)

In my past life before data architecture, I used to be a manufacturing engineer in the automotive industry. At the time, the popular approach was Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System, driven by Toyota’s massive success in the United States.

Lean was—and still is—about increasing value to the customer by reducing and eliminating work that doesn’t add meaningful value. This spawned many tools and practices to surface inefficient habits. One that stayed with me was the concept of “going to gemba.” In Japanese, gemba means “the real place” where work actually happens. In practice, this meant that managers and engineers left the office and went to the shop floor. There they simply observed: stood and watched the work happening, and asked questions of the line operators in a curious and respectful manner. No decisions were made on the floor. Leadership took what they had learned back to the office and used those lessons to shape operational plans.

This concept came to mind as I read this post on LinkedIn:

Continue reading “Going to Gemba”
Posted on

Fire for Effect

My unit: 3rd Battalion, 13th Field Artillery. “Without fear, favor, or hope for reward.” (Source: public domain media)

I went to college on an ROTC scholarship. When I got my degree, I went into active duty service as a lieutenant. During my time on active duty, I served in a field artillery battalion, as part of the operations staff. That is where I learned how the Army actually delivers fire support

The most important thing to know about artillery is that it can’t win the battle alone. The Army relies on maneuver units (tanks and infantry) to seize or hold the battlefield. Artillery supports them by putting shells, rockets, or missiles on the enemy to suppress or destroy it.

How that support is organized is the interesting part. Artillery units usually belong to a division or a corps, but they do not always work directly for that headquarters. Sometimes they shoot higher-level missions such as SEAD (suppression of enemy air defenses) or counterfire (attacking the other side’s artillery). Sometimes they talk straight to a subordinate unit that is in contact and needs rounds now. And sometimes they have a primary mission and a secondary one stacked underneath it.

Continue reading “Fire for Effect”
Posted on

Keep Calm and Corona On

Sources: CNN (left) / Money Inc (right)

As I was folding my laundry tonight, I was thinking about everything that’s happened over the past few days, at the national level, but more importantly what was going around me in my local city. And some things aren’t adding up.

(As I’m writing this, President Trump has just declared a national emergency over the spread of COVID-19, aka the Coronavirus. It’s been only a few days since major sporting events were suspended and cancelled, most notably the NBA and March Madness. So I don’t know right now how things are going to play out over the next few weeks or months.)

Over a decade and a half ago, I used to be a manufacturing engineer in the automotive industry. One of my regular duties was to conduct something called an FMEA, Failure Modes Effects and Analysis. It was a risk assessment over what could possibly go wrong in a car (or a component of it), which guided what type of preventive measures and quality checks had to happen.

The Big Three automakers had a pretty standard system: there were three measures, rated on a scale from 1 to 10. You multiply the three numbers to get anything between 1 and 1 thousand. The bigger the number, the bigger the risk. If it was something under a hundred, you almost didn’t think about. However, if it was close to a thousand, it was all hands-on-deck, the-company-could-go-out-of-business bad.

These were the three measures: severity (what’s the worst case), occurrence (how often does it happen), and detection (how quickly can it be spotted).

I’m going to add in a fourth factor to the calculation: contagion. The automotive FMEA doesn’t account for this, because when a tire blows out on one Ford Explorer, it doesn’t cause three or four other Explorers to crash. So now our scale goes from one to ten thousand.

In thinking about the virus, I decided to apply my FMEA math. So let’s go:

(Disclaimer, I’m going to throw out some numbers, but all of these are second-hand with no references. This is a thought experiment, not a policy paper.)

Continue reading “Keep Calm and Corona On”
Posted on

Following Your Passion Is Horsesh*t

Last week, a classmate from high school reached out to me. He’d been a journalist for about thirty years, but he was starting to see the writing on the wall. (Spoiler alert: print journalism is dying.) He was asking me for advice about jumping ship from journalism and going into technology.

I won’t go into details about what I told him, but I will tell you the principle I approached to his problem. I told him to start with what he was good at. While I’m sure he was looking for advice about getting into coding, what he really wanted to know was, how to reinvent yourself when you find you’re in a career dead end.

Continue reading “Following Your Passion Is Horsesh*t”
Posted on

Clothes Make the Man

“Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”
There’s more truth to that saying than many believe. The conventional wisdom interprets that saying to mean that the way you dress sends an unspoken message to others about yourself that may actually raise or lower your status in their eyes. There is a lot of truth in that.
However, it also sends a message to yourself.

Continue reading “Clothes Make the Man”

Posted on

How to Negotiate Your Salary

The best time to negotiate your salary is right when your future employers make an offer of employment. After you’ve been hired, it’s rare to get a raise beyond a yearly cost of living increase (typically around 3 percent). In over two decades of employment I have I only received a raise higher than cost of living once, and that was due to a change in job responsibilities. (Another engineer in the company had just left, and the engineering manager assigned me his product line, a high-profile product they were trying to grow.)
Here are some guidelines to follow when negotiating salary:

Continue reading “How to Negotiate Your Salary”

Posted on

Military Operations Orders for Civilian Planners and Leaders

One of the first things a military officer learns is the five-paragraph operations order. The operations order, or OPORD, provides a common format for communicating an upcoming mission, what soldiers can expect, and how to carry it out.  The format is the same no matter the size, from a squad of a dozen men to a division exceeding forty thousand.

If you plan projects, or you manage a team, department, or organization of any size, the OPORD can be a useful tool to have in your proverbial toolbelt. As with any tools, there are times to use them and times to try something else. But having the right tool for the right situation is better than improvising with something less effective.

Continue reading “Military Operations Orders for Civilian Planners and Leaders”
Posted on

The SURVIVAL Acronym

When I was in the military, my instructors taught me the SURVIVAL acronym as part of wilderness survival training. The acronym went like this:

  • Size up the Situation
  • Undue Haste Makes Waste
  • Remember Where You Are
  • Vanquish Fear and Panic
  • Improve Your Situation
  • Value Living
  • Act Like the Natives
  • Learn Basic Skills

At some point I may do a deeper dive into these points, but here are some quick takeaways:

Continue reading “The SURVIVAL Acronym”