I Must Be Doing Something Right

Well, we started our configuration control board. The big boss is refusing to attend, and by the charter she is the only one who can make decisions. This is a huge handicap, of course, but she's appointed my division director to act as chair for her, although of course not to make the actual decisions. Our CIO has commanded all of his direct reports to chair their own CCBs, so my big boss is basically telling him to go screw himself. I don't think he has it figured out. I'm the CCB's "secretariat", which is not a racehorse but the person who takes minutes, sends out the agenda, and makes sure the right people get to the meetings prepared to discuss the right things.

So how do I know I'm doing something right? Easy. I got cursed out by one of the big boss's little butt-boys yesterday. I had the effrontery to contest his non-negotiable demand to exempt a purchase he was working on from the CCB. He got increasingly testy in emails, and ignored my phone calls for a couple hours. Then he called and asked me into his office. He started by trying to snow me, then gradualted to attempting to intimidate me. This is only the second time he's spoken to me, so he did not know how unlikely either tactic was to work with me. After a half hour of his expletive-laced haranguing, he started accusing me of "sniping" and lapsed into repeating the word 'shit' every fourth word. He was barely coherent; indeed much of the previous ten minutes was almost as bad. Anyhow, I stood up, said "This conversation is over," and walked out. It turns out that the big boss pulled the plug on his little scheme that morning, and I suspect it had something to do with the fact that they couldn't really avoid the CCB.

You see, up until now the big boss has had a small coterie of contracts and budget people make decisions on purchases. They have a pet contracting officer who does whatever they ask, whether it's legal or not. They never compete anything, and everything starts as an unsolicited proposal from a vendor who is just dying to save us money. I can't figure out whether they're just really stupid, or have some sort of other motivation; but in almost every case, we end up paying more after the new contract than we did before for the same thing. And after every one of these rotten deals, they loudly proclaim the big lie that they've saved money.

Meanwhile, our maintenance and service contracts are expiring left and right without replacements, because they were spending all their time figuring out ways to shovel money into new purchases with the vendors they are so chummy with. (They play our people like violins--it's pretty disgusting.) It is an almost unbelievable mess--it's as though they were trying to screw the government.

Well, the contracts people were just transferred to my boss a couple weeks ago. They used to work directly for the big boss, and the excrement was about to hit the fan, so she wanted a little distance, I guess. Now we're trying to rein in the worst actors and get them to do their jobs right. Really, there's just one who's done the big damage. The others are salvageable, with decent management, but this guy is going to persist in his ways until we force him out, I fear. He can retire any time, and every time he whines to me (which he does every time I see him) I tell him he should think of his health and get out. We'd be so much better off if he left.

It's not an ideal situation. It's actually a pretty bad situation. But there is some chance that it will get better now, a good chance. I'm going to keep plugging away. Yesterday we saved a half-million a year just by shining a flashlight at the baseboards. Things are looking up.