The US Navy just canceled the Constellation guided-missile frigate program , truncating it to two ships (from a planned 6+). The intent is to jettison a troubled program and replace it with a clean-sheet "new small surface combatant" that would be cheaper and faster to build. That's a false hope.

I've written about wartime industrialization before , but a recent podcast and blog post made me more optimistic about the US' ability to ramp up production...as long as we start planning better.

In 2019, the country of Turkey took delivery of S-400 air-defense systems from Russia. The US government then took long-threatened action and forced Turkey off the F-35 fighter jet program. The six F-35s that Turkey had received were impounded in the US (there for training) and Turkey was banned from manufacturing F-35 components .  Enter me.

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.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a manager in possession of a project, must be in want of a project schedule ( With apologies to Jane Austen ). On large projects for the US government there is an "Integrated Master Schedule" (IMS). The IMS is often used as a report deliverable, and so is updated monthly for the customer to see it. I have found that the IMS is most useful as a working document. This is for two reasons: 1) it saves me all of the time to update the IMS for the customer because it's already updated for me, and 2) the IMS is recommended for a reason, and I try to take full advantage of it. 1937 Panama Canal schedule My peak time using IMS as a tool was doing new product introductions for military landing gears. At that time I had several simultaneous projects, all requiring Department-of-Defense-compliant Integrated Master Schedules, which included a 14-point compliance check as well as a variety of metrics that defined the "health" ...

The Overthinking It podcast expressed some thoughts on procrastination that I hadn't heard before. They describe procrastination as a successful tool for dealing with anxiety, and relate a story about parenting that feels very familiar.

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 had direct reports temporarily assigned to me a few times.  Normally that meant that I didn't manage their "HR" tasks (e.g. time cards), but for whatever reason I needed to step in to help a team achieve a turnaround that was durable enough that the people could be "handed back" to their regular manager after only a few weeks or months and the benefits would continue. I understand management expectations, set team expectations, and manage the team while improving their processes and tools.

Update schedule change: I'm dropping my Friday updates going forward: with my childcare duties and having burned through much of the backlog of items I wanted to blog about, I'll be updating only two days per week: Monday and Wednesday. All of us use our communication tools in different ways. Some people live and breathe their social media; I'm only on Facebook in case someone from high school wants to send out information about a reunion. I'm not judging. Assuming that your intent in communication is to communicate, then what matters more is matching the expectations of how and when to communicate with whomever you're talking to; let's call them your "partner" because communication is a group effort. Email is not urgent For some people it is, but for me if I need something urgently (or someone needs it from me), email is not the right tool. I check my email at least once per day, but sometimes only that often, and it might be a glance on my pho...

  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...