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>The bottom line is getting officers out of their offices. The rest will follow. This is not necessarily true. An analogy would be saying a company has a soft
by colechristensen 3y ago
>The bottom line is getting officers out of their offices. The rest will follow.
This is not necessarily true.
An analogy would be saying a company has a software quality problem where things are always late and broken... and thinking the solution is hiring more managers and getting them more involved in the day-to-day work of programmers.
Management is a part of the problem but throwing more managers at the problem isn't the solution.
Defense acquisitions is hideously complex and involves many stakeholders from entirely different heirarchies often changing their minds half way through and making politically- or career-motivated decisions that have little to do with "doing a good job".
Fixing this involves somebody or some group motivated more by "doing a good job" than everybody else's motivations to go in and sort out the inefficiencies and broken processes and organization. It's hard. It's not a matter of "we need more of our guys in on this".
- gonzo41 3y ago> getting them more involved in the day-to-day work of programmers. Just a point. Getting people involved in the day to day of programmers, or really any one building things is exactly what works. The more management know, the better they are at unblocking problems, or steering people onto the correct task. It's magical thinking to heap crap on managers and expect that devs or welders will just build the correct thing.
- colechristensen 3y agoI take it you’ve never been micromanaged. Management well done doesn’t equal just more of it. Organizations in trouble often just reach for exactly that and in doing so make things worse. Better can mean doing more in some places, but things don’t automatically improve by adding more management.
- nateglims 3y agoMy understanding is that the officers are supposed to be doing this oversight and not traditional management. The shift-left aspect of it is more about correcting problems sooner rather than letting a huge capital investment go to waste.
- pdonis 3y agoThe article is not saying to hire more officers. It is saying that the officers we already have are not spending their time where they need to be. Also, the officers are not managing the shipyards. They are doing customer oversight. So having the officers spend more time out of their offices is not a case of managers getting more involved in day-to-day work. It's a case of the customer's representative getting more involved in understanding how the product is made and seeing the impact of that on customer requirements.