I've had the rare privilege of managing an aircraft development program from early drawings on napkins through first-flight approval. During that time I had the most effective of feedback loops: living with the consequences of my choices earlier in the process. Due to the holiday on Wednesday, today is my only post this week.

When confronted with a new role at work, I often review the existing instructions, procedures, and templates. Frequently, I have found them out-of-date and involving wasteful steps. To pass on things better than I found them, I try to leave an impact through making process improvements and updating those documents.

Collecting approvals and signatures is never fun, but in order to implement a large change in any organization, it needs people with authority to "buy in" to the change. In a large organization, that includes signatures and presentations; in a small business it might be pausing between bites of lunch to mention the change and see if the owner objects. Either way, if the people with the power to implement or stop a change aren't in favor, the change won't happen. One of my first tasks in 2023 upon assuming a new role was learning about a key initiative and pushing its approval through many layers of management.

As I've been looking for my next role, I've had to think about what my "ideal job" might look like. I've also had to think about what my "superpower" is: what I uniquely bring to a hiring organization. I don't know that I have a complete answer, but I reached a few conclusions recently. My ideal job is to take on a broken-but-fixable organization and bring it to where it doesn't need heroism to survive day-to-day. My superpower is to create the organizational bandwidth to make that happen.

I've gotten a broad view of the various aircraft out there today, and have been involved in the design or manufacture of many too. All photos are mine or public domain.

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