Tag Archives: policy

Rework…

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Interpreting policy memos, white papers, and more informal summaries are my bread and butter. I’ve got a bit of a knack for distilling ten pages of official-ese into a one or two paragraph overview. I may not be an expert on whatever topics are dropped in front of me, but I’ve cultivated a skill at seeing through extraneous bullshit and identifying what someone needs to know versus what’s actually written on the page. Sometimes that’s a skill that’s more trouble than it’s worth.

At 10:00 yesterday morning I was given a couple of dozen pages and told to gin up a two page summary by 3:00. No problem there. That’s plenty of time to get the job done and still manage a leisurely lunch. The real issue is boss who drops by at 2:45 to provide some helpful insight on the areas he wants to highlight. While that guidance might have been helpful at some point, it wasn’t particularly useful after spending four hours developing my own salient points.

So today, I’ll spend another three or four hours covering the same ground, but putting a slightly different spin on it. Any chance I had of feeling productive this week is officially dead.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Proper punctuation prevents poor performance…

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Some things we do are important and can have a real impact on real people scattered around the world. Those are the kinds of things you don’t mind spending hours working to perfect. Ensuring that there are the correct number of spaces following the various kinds of punctuation doesn’t generally fall into that category. Sure, formatting and general “prettiness” of a document are important insofar as you want it to be put together enough that people take your product seriously, but somehow I don’t think it’s important enough that we need to spend 20 or 30 man-hours making sure that everything in a 75 page document that no one outside these four walls will ever lay eyes on is “just so.” Then again, I have been wrong, or perhaps only misguided, before.

Look, I’m all for providing the best product possible, but I’m also a believer in the law of diminishing returns. There comes a point where it just isn’t cost effective to keep tweaking something around the margins. We all have personal pet peeves and certain ways we like to do things, but we’ve now officially letting perfection stand in the way of good enough to its illogical extreme. But hey, I’m not the guy signing the checks or deciding who works on what and for how long, so as long as the direct deposit doesn’t start bouncing, I’ll sit here plugging away at whatever someone tells me is the day’s priority. Today, like yesterday, it seems that that priority is word spacing and paragraph alignment. Don’t ask me why that is, but I’ll keep plugging away at it until someone tells me to shuffle on to something else.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Rules…

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I’m never going to be nominated for sainthood. I’ve made my peace with that. Still, there are some unbreakable, iron clad rules that I live my life by. They’re not negotiable under any circumstances. Not ever. That’s not to say I’m not tempted to break them on an almost daily basis. One thing I’ve noticed though, is the moments when you’re most tempted to break your own rules are generally the moments when they should apply the most. Rules are pesky things like that. It’s almost unfortunate.

Logic doesn’t live here…

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I’ve been doing this long enough now that I’m always a little surprised when something is ridiculous enough to shock me. That’s why I could only smirk when someone came by and asked me if I was going to training this morning. After explaining that I had just taken that training last month, my esteemed colleague looked around nervously before explaining that last month’s training covered me only for last fiscal year. This month’s training was required to cover me for the current fiscal year. By some fluke of scheduling it was just pure chance that the exact same class happened to get scheduled in back to back months.

Some people would find this odd, perhaps, but I’ve been a cog in Uncle’s machine long enough to know when I won’t get ahead by asking any more questions. This morning was one of those times and I dutifully went to the auditorium so they could update my now 42 day old certification. The snores coming from the guy beside me and the one two rows over fed into my hunch that I wasn’t the only one sitting here for the second time in as many months. Like the good troopers we are, we checked the box and hopefully won’t see this class for another 13 months.

So much for a productive morning.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Welcome douchbag…

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We’re getting a visit from one of our regional managers. That’s not really unusual. It seems there’s always one of them wandering around the building for some reason or another. This visit is only special because the manager in question is pretty much a giant douchebag. That’s actually speculative on my part because the guy has never actually bothered to show up or call in for any of the regional managers meetings that have been scheduled in the six months he’s worked for us. So really I don’t know anything about him other than he doesn’t do meetings, or return phone calls, or think policy applies to him. Come to think of it, I’m pretty ok with standing firm on my assessment of douchebag.

The issue isn’t so much one of the guy being off the reservation most of the time as it is that no one in a position to do anything about it seems to a) know it or b) feel compelled to take action. That’s just a solitary example of why having actual leaders in leadership positions might actually be important. You’d think by now I’d have developed a better ability to manage my expectations. It’s probably best to just go back to my cube, keep my head down, and get the day over with with as little increase in my blood pressure as possible.

Do you think hanging up a “Welcome Douchebag” banner in front of the building would be considered somehow inappropriate?

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Well trained…

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As a matter of policy, we want a well trained and highly educated workforce to carry out the agency’s business. One of the great military-as-management-philosophy aphorisms is that an organization should “train as it fights.” That is to say, it should build its training program based on situations and circumstances it will encounter in the real world. Of course that’s not the standard we train against.

Our training is driven by a “points” system. Each of several hundred real world and online courses are valued as a specific number of training points. Once you reach the prescribed number of points for the year, you are, by definition, “well trained.” This is great if your objective is to be well trained in as short a time as possible; not so much if you actually want to learn something. Then again, learning something isn’t actually part of the training requirement so if it happens, that’s mostly just a bonus.

On a recent morning I had a few hours of unplanned free time, I racked up more than half of my required yearly points after about three hours of clicking through various PowerPoint slides and Flash presentations… while also having discussions with other staffers, answering the phone, sending email, and monitoring breaking news on Charlie Sheen. I don’t think that was necessarily the kind of quality learning the training office hoped to achieve, but that’s what happens when you base the requirement on earning a fixed number of points rather than on actual knowledge gained or skills needed to stay current in your career field. This is doubly true when you write off professional pride as a motivating factor.

Fortunately, I’m now officially “well trained” for 2011… so I can put this sad, sad experience out of my mind for another 11 months.

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.