Usually my best gripes and complaints come from the road. At the moment, that well is pretty dry. We spent most of today going over paper work and doing some preliminary reading for tomorrow. We have an early start tomorrow at 6:45, though, so that could be something getting lined up. TDY isn’t about getting up early, or rather it shouldn’t be. So yeah, tomorrow looks to be the marathon day of this trip. If we can wrap it up by having more answers that questions, I’ll consider the day a success. Then it’s back to Memphis for the next round and to start getting the heavy duty report put together. Should be fun.

In the movies, the Army is a well regulated organization, where people follow orders… Or maybe that’s just in the John Wayne movies that I grew up watching. Whatever the case, when I came to work for them, I anticipated that the headquarters would issue orders and the subordinates would carry them out. The reality is more like the headquarters making a suggestion and then frets, argues, and finally pleads for someone to do almost anything.

As hard as it is to believe, I’m not sitting around dreaming up ways to make people’s lives more difficult. I am, however, trying to come up with ideas that over the long term will make the organization more efficient and that will actually help people do their work smarter. There again is another assumption… That people have come to work to, you know, actually work. It’s possible that I’ve been misled there as well.

For the record, “because we’ve been doing it like that since 1974” isn’t a good enough reason to keep doing something. Seriously, it’s time for you ride off into the sunset and leave management to those who have had an original thought in the last quarter century.

One of the hardest things about being married to the work is that from time to time you have to face the fact that some project you’ve been working on for a long time just flat out sucks… that it needs to be scrapped… and that you need to take it in a completely different direction. It’s even harder when you’re so close to the project that you need a contractor to be a disinterested third party and break the bad news. Happily, the ship isn’t sinking and just needs a course correction, but it’s not something any PM wants to hear.

We’re going to wrap up the review tomorrow and I’m sure we’ll uncover a few more things that need to be addressed when we rework things over the summer. The hardest part is going to be reminding myself that I can’t be the action officer on all of these changes… Anyone want to take a swing at guessing how good I am at handing off my babies and letting someone else work out the details?

For someone who has always valued the solidity of a good plan, I’m actually a little disturbed at how competent I’ve become in the art of just winging it. I wouldn’t say I was unprepared for the project that I was working on today, as I helped put most of the groundwork for it in place three years ago… But as far as any actual special prep work for today’s session, I hadn’t spent a lick of time preparing or even thinking about it. Maybe it’s some kind of auto-pilot for career bureaucrats. Whatever the case, I’m pleased to report that it almost sounds like we have half a plan put together and that we are closer now to the future than we’ve ever been before. Now all I need to do is survive three more days with the contractors without bludgeoning myself into unconsciousness. In all seriousness, they’re good at what they’re doing, but it’s a tune I’ve heard before and it seems the further I get along into my career the less I’m interested in how people are going to do things and the more I just want to see them getting done on time. Color me a man in a gray flannel suit.