I took the link/email/link sequence to be a validation that I work at a place where they've made an HUP agreement. That may have been an optimistic assumption.

I've still not received that confirmation email. After some hunting on the HUP website, I found this message:

We are sorry, but we are unable to complete your request.
The following problem(s) exist:
Your order is currently in a review status

Beg pardon, folks? Whatever can you be "reviewing" that takes four days? You're waiting for HR to confirm my existence, perhaps? (Should I call Enrique and push things along?) Or perhaps you've sicced the Pinkertons on me? Is this long delay common? Shouldn't you have warned me about it? You can't be bothered to send a courtesy email?

How about you give my money back?

Wednesday, May 5: Still waiting. They must be digging hard....

And four co-workers--two I've been working with daily of late, and two others I'd worked with on several projects--chose yesterday to retire. A day full of good-byes....

This sort of day always sets me to thinking about my own retirement. Not yet. But I can see the end.

A substantial body of research indicates that private enterprise is inherently efficient. The people who wrote that research appear to work at think tanks, however, not private enterprises.

Anyone who has worked in a private enterprise knows what really goes on there. In any enterprise of more than a few dozen people, bureaucratic barriers and pockets of unproductivity crop up and stay around for long periods of time. A bumbling but politically astute manager can hire incompetent staff and maintain a whole department of dead weight, dragging down the efforts of others. Companies are irrational entities: they refuse to acknowledge errors promptly and pour good money after bad.

In short, all the failings attributed to government happen in private enterprises too. These failings are a fixture of human nature and organizational dynamics.

Andy Oram/Getting Universal Service to Work

Every now and then Andy Oram produces something really interesting.  This long essay is mainly about how to make universal service happen (not just broadband, though that's the main focus), but it touches on a whole lot of other topics as well; they include bureaucratic inertia, creative public servants, and the impact on policy of special interests.  And there's some discussion of unintended consequences.

Well worth your time.

I agree wholeheartedly with his main point, which is that the system is broken.  Part of the fascination of this year's budget negotiations in Michigan has been that it's clear that the legislative leadership disagrees with the governor about key issues, but that both sides have been working to find workable compromises and mutually acceptable solutions.  That's how government is supposed to work, and it's worth cheering when things work out.  But sometimes more is needed, and it's becoming clear that now is one of those times.  The next step is to get beyond the legislative duct tape and the temporary administrative measures to build something we can live with for another generation.  Perhaps this is the opportunity.

American government is designed to accomodate disagreement, though the tension often makes folks uncomfortable.  What we need, sometime soon, is a civil discussion about what Michigan's government is for, how we get to that point, and what tax structure we need to support that effort.  The (less-than-complete) success of the Michigan budget efforts demonstrates that it's not necessary to continue talking past each other just because we've been doing so in the past.  Discussion isn't helped when each side caricatures the other's positions.   The habit many have of simplifying and dismissing the other party's position is really poisonous to the civil culture.  It's time we stopped, and started finding solutions.

It's not often I feel sympathy for Scott Adams' idiot Pointy Haired Boss, so yesterday's edition deserves a comment.

Every non-trivial project, including many which don't involve programming in any sense, eventually reaches this point.  Rands talks about the issue; so does Joe Bork. (Edit 11/6/07: Here's Eric Nehrlich of Fog Creek making the same point.) Of course we'd prefer to build a perfect process, but there are competing concerns.  Eventually, you must move the loose ends to Phase II, or you'll never complete the project.  One of the manager's jobs is to recognize the necessities/ expectations/ intentions driving the project, and to find the balance point.  The resulting conversation (more likely, meeting) will sound pretty much like the May 4 strip.

The last panel's right, too.  Applying appropriate labels is a fair part of the job.  Pointy's usual problem is that he gets this wrong.

Three panels just aren't enough to carry the argument--you have to already know about Pointy for the joke to make sense.  If Adams had been building to this strip for a week--showing that the project really had spun out of control, and that Pointy really doesn't know how to balance this stuff--I'd like it a lot better. 

Or perhaps I just don't understand.

Although the department has internal reorganizations regularly, this is the first major reconfiguration of the external operation during my career.  Said differently, this is a strategic move in an area where we've usually made tactical adjustments.  It's going to be an interesting year.  I expect to see some modifications to the plan as the politics play out, but things will likely shape up pretty much as announced.  Since my responsibilities are primarily internal, I'll mostly be a spectator.

A few notes:

• The newspapers' responses reflect geography and local social realities.  Detroit coverage is generally favorable, while outstate coverage is tentative--except in northern Michigan, where consolidation always looks like a service cut, even if the service actually improves at the surviving locations.  The U.P. isn't exactly a wilderness, but settlements are generally small, and far between.
• Internally, the message is opportunity.  No jobs will be cut; the larger office staffs will create new management positions and new promotion paths.
• The papers are not following the department's spelling conventions for the renamed operations.

By the way, our department's press office provides a fine clipping service.  Every day's mail brings excellent coverage of the day's issues, whether favorable or not, and without an obvious political slant.

I went to the awards ceremony, of course, and lunched with the crew for the first time in several years.  Despite major reorganizations, major changes in laws and processes, and a decade and a half of history, the staff remains pretty much the same as "my" staff, so it was dinner with old friends.  When we were young, we partied together, but we've all grown families, or stodgy, or something.  'Twas fun.

I'm real proud of 'em.

I'd include a photo, but the Olympus has gone sick....

In my experience, absolutely no bureaucractic entity (yuck, dabbler--don't talk like that!) is truly created from the ground up. There's always an organizational context, a political context, legacy data, system integration issues, staffing issues--and it's impossible (and rarely desirable) to remove those contexts and continuities from the new organization's environment. On the other hand, the usual object is to move the organizational focus, which is nearly always gainful (and painful). This article explores how those things played on in the Homeland Security context; the scale's different from mine, but the issues are familiar. Looking forward to Todd's followup article....

Link courtesy of CIO Magazine's KM Newsletter.

The Army had trained more DSTE operators than there were empty slots, so we were TDPFO in the desert, waiting for the installation teams to build the places we'd work.  We had some notion of the pending construction, and we were being permitted to "bid" on specific stations.  (That worked like this:  As each installation was completed, the TDPFO GI who'd been longest at Huachuca was asked if he wanted to go there; they worked down the seniority list until the slots were filled.  If this method didn't fill the staff, the most senior folks "won" the assignment, regardless of preference.  Getting what you wanted had some risks, and involved balancing what you knew about construction progress with your actual wishes, but it worked out well for most of us.  In my case, London came up the day after I accepted an assignment to the San Francisco area.  I might have lived a different life.)  (No regrets, he wistfully claims.)

I spent three months at Huachuca, which was pretty typical.  Many of the folks I attended DSTE classes with ended up in either LA or Seattle, in the same command as my SF assignment, and several of us moved together to Pleiku at the end of the year.

Pepys was a delightful diarist, and worth reading for all sorts of reasons. One which (naturally) appeals to me is that he was a professional bureaucrat in a time when bureaucracies were new to European government. Bureaus were small, too; they seem to have run the Royal Navy with just a handful of clerks. (I seem to be ignoring the admirals....) Part of the fun when I read Pepys is watching him feel his way around the organizational issues. Not to mention office politics. And real politics.

At least I don't have the King of England watching over my shoulder....

Phil Gyford's Pepys Diary website posts today's entry each day, blog-style, 343 years to the day after they were written. A splendid application of modern technology, if you ask me.

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