A shorter musing today about why we remember the little things that'd we'd otherwise remember at work: it's not because of diligence, it's because those memories represent scar tissue. During my first stint in Supply Chain as an Analyst, I was impressed with the Supply Chain Managers because they would rattle off part numbers at the drop of a hat. "Did you hear about [Supplier]? They're behind on the ABC123 and DEF345 part numbers!" "Well, as long as GHI678 is holding its commits, I'm happy." They seemed to have developed superpowers where they knew the entire bill of material for the company and could talk about each part in minute detail. Now, many years later, I also can rattle off part numbers at the drop of a hat, but they're different part numbers. Because ABC123 might never have hurt me, but I've laid awake at night wondering if the machine shop could complete JKL999 without any more quality issues. Anyone who has been r...

This is the fourth of a series of posts about tools I've built or used to make life easier. Although I did make a new Excel spreadsheet to keep it all organized, Change Board was more about how I prepared for, ran, and followed up on meetings than the tool itself. I know this because I passed the tool on for others to use and when I was invited to see others using it their meetings didn't feel as crisp. Change Board feels like something that shouldn't be especially difficult, but I've seen lots of programs with nonfunctional Change Boards. Previous posts in the series: Overlap tool Follow-up through Outlook, OneNote, and To Do RFQ / CBF SAP tool Increased Scope Means More Change Board I hosted my first Change Boards when I became a Program Manager. Initially that meant small direct-ship programs (the parts never touched our docks, just shipped directly to the customer) with minimal design changes and stable schedules. I used the format that the previous Program Man...

No F-15 without the XB-70 (via the MiG-25)  This is the second post in an occasional series on aviation, so far mostly military and looking back historically. Previously, we talked about bombers: why some will make it 100 years while the newest get retired . Today: how we see our opponents' actions affects what we're doing, and how we might not have the F-15 Eagle without the XB-70 Valkyrie.   XB-70 Valkyrie :  USA Mach-3 intercontinental bomber MiG-25 Foxbat :  Soviet Mach-3 anti-bomber interceptor       F-15 Eagle :  USA Mach-2.5 anti-fighter fighter The bomber... In the 1950s, the United States needed a new intercontinental bomber. In order to maintain deterrence with the Soviet Union, the US needed a bomber which could reliably deliver nuclear weapons across huge distances through extensive Soviet air defenses. If the Soviets thought that they could intercept all or most of the US bombers before they hit their targets, then they might thi...

  In my time as a Program Manager / Value Stream Leader, I came to two realizations about outrage: the advantages of having someone in the organization be outraged, and the ways to defuse outrage by a customer. Using Outrage When I had been working for my company for around 10 years, a new-ish hire (MF) walked into my office and complained about how poor our on-time delivery was. Our process to get from a customer order to the part starting manufacturing (in-house or at a supplier) seemed to take forever, the lead times at the suppliers were long, or quality issues would crop up (introducing more rework time). And I realized that I didn't notice our on-time delivery anymore. When I first joined the company, I thought our lead times on a report were measured in days (because when I saw "40" for a part that seemed reasonable) and they were actually measured in weeks. When I started I thought that of course we should be able to hit our delivery commitments. After all m...

This is the third of a series of posts about tools I've built or used to make life easier. The request for quote (RFQ) / competitive bid file (CBF) file was the result of two different projects which a) took a list of all parts and potential suppliers for customer request for proposal, b) created RFQs for every part/supplier combination, c) enabled easy data-entry of quotes when they came back, and d) uploaded everything to our SAP system so that we had a single central database of all RFQ and quote information and the ability to convert those quotes to purchase orders. All of these tools in their current iterations are the property of my former employer, but I built them once and I could build them again. This tool included Excel formulas, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code, and SAP macros. Headline improvement: 98% touch-time reduction

We've all struggled with our to-do lists. The core of my current method came about in 2012 when I was drowning in tasks. I was leading 10 different projects simultaneously, and often I would ask someone for information and then never get a response back. I realized that I needed to consolidate all my various task lists into one place and be reminded if I hadn't heard back from someone. I ended up using Microsoft Outlook. Like many large corporations, we were a Microsoft Office organization so I already had all of my emails in Outlook. The neat trick with Outlook is that you can "flag" emails for follow-up (for you or for your recipients) and those flags will show up in your task list, along with any non-email tasks you put in. Because so many of my inquiries were via email, and many of my tasks were answering emails from my management or customers, I could simply flag an email rather than write up an action item in a separate program. And the real beauty was that befo...

This is the first of a series of posts about tools I've built to make life easier. The overlap tool was the first one I built to include SAP code. All of these tools in their current iterations are the property of my former employer, but I built them once and I could build them again. This one in particular was bugging me a few weeks before I was laid off, where I was thinking that I would build it completely differently because of what I know now. Headline improvement: 1 week of effort to 5 minutes (99.8%) In 2022-ish, I was the Senior Manager for Work Transfer. I had a team of six Work Transfer Mangers who were handed business plans for dual-sourcing or re-sourcing a collection of part numbers and then charged with executing those transfers within the required timeline and avoiding any gap in supply. This meant that the managers needed to see the number of parts in-stock at our company, incoming supply from the incumbent and future sources, and the timing and quantity of an...

Since before I had direct reports, I've strongly believed in the power of the regularly-scheduled 1:1 meeting between an employee and their manager. I first experienced this when I was a Project Manager for "Manufacturing Integration Projects", which was the team assigned to close one factory, open two more, and expand a third. My boss Mike put a standing half-hour meeting on my calendar where we'd chat about what I'd done that week, what I was planning to do, and any obstacles in my way. Sometimes the meetings ran short, sometimes they ran long, but they were extremely helpful in ensuring that I knew what was expected of me, keeping Mike informed, and coaching me past the various issues. While still in that role, I followed Mike's example and set up regular meetings with select internal customers and team members. All of my assigned projects were able to start production at their new sites without significant issue. Once I moved into Program Management / ...

Modern aerospace design and manufacturing is amazing. Dimensions and tolerances are measured in thousandths of an inch and design tools lead to ever-reducing weight for the same strength. Those designs can do amazing things: for landing gear titanium is roughly half the weight of steel for a given strength, but far more expensive. My former company was able to propose (and win) a new airliner contract by proposing a steel landing gear that weighed less than our competitor's titanium landing gear. But that optimization comes at a cost. The US Air Force currently operates three heavy bombers: The B-52 Stratofortress, entry into service 1952: The B-1B Lancer, entry into service 1986: The B-2 Spirit, entry into service 1997 Of those three aircraft types, two are being retired and replaced by the new B-21 Raider expected to enter service sometime in the late 2020s. Care to guess which one will keep flying alongside the B-21? B-52 (1952) B-1B (1986) B-2 (1997) The early 1950s B-52 wi...