Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Twenty Minutes!
Looking over the previous posts made me realize that I haven't updated the blog on Configuration Management stuff. That's going great. The board I helped start is now the heart of the decisionmaking process in my organization. That "Big Boss" I referred to was promoted, and her replacement takes his job more seriously--he actually attends. After the first year, I was replaced as secretariat, which was fine with me. I've since helped start a "Configuration Management Library" that serves as the CM database for our documents. It's a start. I'm heartened by events in this area, not just in my organization but in the IRS as a whole. We're making progress.
Over Two Years?!?
I'm not sure what I was thinking to start this blog. It probably involved improving government procurement practices. What a moron I can be! I had to go back to TIGTA recently with a complaint about the very same contract I went to them about seven years ago. Three months later, all I got from TIGTA was a form email acknowledging they got my complaint. Essentially, we paid over $3M more than any sane honest customer would pay for the right to use some software on a slightly bigger mainframe. I laid it on the line with my bosses, told them I was going to report it if they did it, and they went ahead anyway. They were more scared of their executives than they were of getting rapped on the knuckles in an investigation they weren't sure was going to be conducted. So far, their judgment has been vindicated.
I could have retired a year and a half ago. I'm hanging on until my kids finish college, I get a few more things done on the job, and I can make a positive difference on procurement policy. I may be working until I drop dead, an event that some in management would celebrate. I'm sick of those people...what is so great about rising in the ranks of govt if all you're going to do is bully people and make bad decisions? Then they scheme to land a job with one of the vendors they've been dealing with. It's not an easy sell, because most of them are worthless except as influence peddlers, and as soon as they walk out, they've lost their influence.
I'm not sure when the next post will be. But if an investigation results from my complaint, I'll let you know.
I could have retired a year and a half ago. I'm hanging on until my kids finish college, I get a few more things done on the job, and I can make a positive difference on procurement policy. I may be working until I drop dead, an event that some in management would celebrate. I'm sick of those people...what is so great about rising in the ranks of govt if all you're going to do is bully people and make bad decisions? Then they scheme to land a job with one of the vendors they've been dealing with. It's not an easy sell, because most of them are worthless except as influence peddlers, and as soon as they walk out, they've lost their influence.
I'm not sure when the next post will be. But if an investigation results from my complaint, I'll let you know.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Management
I'm not qualified to say whether government managers are, on average, better or worse than those in private industry. I've spent my entire career in one agency in the Federal Government. However, I can say that management in that agency has not, on average, been good. I read a recent article that blames the Bush Administration's failure to recruit enough competent top-level executives on the pay disparity with private industry; I don't think that's the problem. For those political appointees, there is no shortage of smart, dedicated, and willing people who are itching to implement the agenda of the President. It's just that this President doesn't seem to be able to pick the ones that will do a good job. I attribute this to bad priorities: this White House prizes personal loyalty first, party loyalty second, and ideological purity third. Competence is way down the list.
In any hierarchical organization, the tone is set at the top. A friend who had a high-level job at FEMA recounted how Joe Allbaugh (G W Bush's first FEMA Director) wasted no time alienating the staff with his arrogance and ignorance of the job. He then proceeded to make decisions based primarily on politics. Michael Brown (forever to be remembered as "Brownie") continued in the same vein. These are not stupid people; they are just incompetent at running organizations, and were never focused on the agency's mission. The Homeland Security reorg sealed the fate of anyone who was relying on FEMA to ameliorate the effects of the next big natural disaster. At Interior, another friend reported that Bush's appointees were uniformly sharp, but concentrated on implementing an agenda set not by Congress but the Western States' Legal Foundation. Not only have the nation's parks and natural resources suffered, but there has been a political backlash from ordinary Westerners who have just started to wake up to the true meaning of all that Fed-bashing financed by the timber and mineral extraction interests.
Ideally, the President would choose good administrators who understand and are dedicated to the mission of the agency they'd head. It's pretty simple. Such people exist, too, although when the President opposes the [i]raison d'etre[/i] of an agency, it's unlikely that such a fit will be discovered and maintained. (Christine Whitman did fairly well at the EPA but had to leave when it became clear that Bush did not support the agency's mission.) Politics leads to some spectacularly bad choices, like Bush's first Education secretary. And of course this President's penchant for allowing the White House staff to make all the policy has made cabinet posts less enticing to excellent people. Put it all together and you have a paucity of inspirational leadership at the top levels of government.
Below the political appointees is the Senior Executive Service (SES). They are usually highly responsive to the desires of the political appointees, which can be bad or good depending on those appointees. That's because they don't have the full Civil Service protections, being executives. Unfortunately (and I imagine it's the same in the private sector), these tend to be the people who consider their careers to be their number one priority. They are generally masters at office politics but have little devotion to the mission. That has to be impressed upon them from above, and we already covered why that isn't happening. Left to their own devices, SESers will reorganize themselves into better jobs, throwing their agencies into turmoil, at the first excuse. They will think up flashy projects to make their marks and reputations, and will leave their jobs before they have to deliver. They will try to impress potential future employers in the private sector by throwing them large contracts. They're not dumb or crooked or evil; they're just personally ambitious.
Middle management consists of a mixture of SESers-in-waiting, burnouts, and good competent managers. They too will usually respond to SES direction. Unfortunately, that direction often takes the form of telling them to implement the SESer's self-aggrandizing ideas. Line managers are all too often good technicians promoted into a job they dislike and aren't good at so they can make more money, but there are a lot of good managers here, and some with ambitions to be in middle management or higher. Line managers are not as responsive to direction, on average, due to their proximity to the employees in the hierarchy whom they have to get to do the actual work. It's not easy to be a line manager anywhere. In the government, they are faced with our personnel system, which makes it extremely difficult to hire, fire, or move employees. Most take the easy way out and give everyone great evaluations, and assign the work to those who will do it while allowing the slackers to coast without penalty.
Like I say, it has to come from the top. I'm skeptical that personnel "reforms" will do much good as long as the entire bureaucracy is seen by its boss ( the President) as a necessary evil which may as well be staffed by loyalists with questionable credentials. But there is no doubt that it is just too hard to discipline employees for nonperformance, and too cumbersome to hire people. By the time we get around to selecting someone from outside, they've already found another job in the private sector. So my prescription boils down to: electing a President who takes government very seriously and who will prize competence and dedication to the agency's mission above personal loyalty; get busy on hiring a raft of good young people who will be the backbone of the Federal bureaucracy in the coming decades; and instilling a dedication to the agency's mission to the entire hierarchy. Basic stuff, but it isn't common today.
In any hierarchical organization, the tone is set at the top. A friend who had a high-level job at FEMA recounted how Joe Allbaugh (G W Bush's first FEMA Director) wasted no time alienating the staff with his arrogance and ignorance of the job. He then proceeded to make decisions based primarily on politics. Michael Brown (forever to be remembered as "Brownie") continued in the same vein. These are not stupid people; they are just incompetent at running organizations, and were never focused on the agency's mission. The Homeland Security reorg sealed the fate of anyone who was relying on FEMA to ameliorate the effects of the next big natural disaster. At Interior, another friend reported that Bush's appointees were uniformly sharp, but concentrated on implementing an agenda set not by Congress but the Western States' Legal Foundation. Not only have the nation's parks and natural resources suffered, but there has been a political backlash from ordinary Westerners who have just started to wake up to the true meaning of all that Fed-bashing financed by the timber and mineral extraction interests.
Ideally, the President would choose good administrators who understand and are dedicated to the mission of the agency they'd head. It's pretty simple. Such people exist, too, although when the President opposes the [i]raison d'etre[/i] of an agency, it's unlikely that such a fit will be discovered and maintained. (Christine Whitman did fairly well at the EPA but had to leave when it became clear that Bush did not support the agency's mission.) Politics leads to some spectacularly bad choices, like Bush's first Education secretary. And of course this President's penchant for allowing the White House staff to make all the policy has made cabinet posts less enticing to excellent people. Put it all together and you have a paucity of inspirational leadership at the top levels of government.
Below the political appointees is the Senior Executive Service (SES). They are usually highly responsive to the desires of the political appointees, which can be bad or good depending on those appointees. That's because they don't have the full Civil Service protections, being executives. Unfortunately (and I imagine it's the same in the private sector), these tend to be the people who consider their careers to be their number one priority. They are generally masters at office politics but have little devotion to the mission. That has to be impressed upon them from above, and we already covered why that isn't happening. Left to their own devices, SESers will reorganize themselves into better jobs, throwing their agencies into turmoil, at the first excuse. They will think up flashy projects to make their marks and reputations, and will leave their jobs before they have to deliver. They will try to impress potential future employers in the private sector by throwing them large contracts. They're not dumb or crooked or evil; they're just personally ambitious.
Middle management consists of a mixture of SESers-in-waiting, burnouts, and good competent managers. They too will usually respond to SES direction. Unfortunately, that direction often takes the form of telling them to implement the SESer's self-aggrandizing ideas. Line managers are all too often good technicians promoted into a job they dislike and aren't good at so they can make more money, but there are a lot of good managers here, and some with ambitions to be in middle management or higher. Line managers are not as responsive to direction, on average, due to their proximity to the employees in the hierarchy whom they have to get to do the actual work. It's not easy to be a line manager anywhere. In the government, they are faced with our personnel system, which makes it extremely difficult to hire, fire, or move employees. Most take the easy way out and give everyone great evaluations, and assign the work to those who will do it while allowing the slackers to coast without penalty.
Like I say, it has to come from the top. I'm skeptical that personnel "reforms" will do much good as long as the entire bureaucracy is seen by its boss ( the President) as a necessary evil which may as well be staffed by loyalists with questionable credentials. But there is no doubt that it is just too hard to discipline employees for nonperformance, and too cumbersome to hire people. By the time we get around to selecting someone from outside, they've already found another job in the private sector. So my prescription boils down to: electing a President who takes government very seriously and who will prize competence and dedication to the agency's mission above personal loyalty; get busy on hiring a raft of good young people who will be the backbone of the Federal bureaucracy in the coming decades; and instilling a dedication to the agency's mission to the entire hierarchy. Basic stuff, but it isn't common today.
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Curses--Scooped by the Post
This is what procrastination gets you--the loss of the chance to say "you heard it hear first". I've been intending to write about the coming wave of Federal retirements (referred to more picturesquely below as a "tsunami") and what it means for the country. But something else was always more important. Well, this morning's Post makes it clear that I was not the only one concerned about this, and someone in authority is even making a stab at trying to do something about it--or at least look as though something's being done.
OK, how big a deal can it be, you might ask? It's just a bunch of overpaid bureaucrats, after all. There are more where they came from, right?
Well, yeah, there are more. But the govt isn't looking for them (see below) and doesn't make it easy to join. There has also been a twenty year push for contracting out governmental functions, which I am convinced has inhibited hiring initiatives. Consequently, when I walk the halls here in the IRS offices in New Carrollton (which I sometimes refer to as "Castle Greyskull"), most of the people I see are over 50. The number one social activity is retirement parties, and the number one topic of conversation is how long we have to work before we can go out on full retirement. (Nine and a half months, though I almost certainly won't leave as soon as I'm eligible--thanks for asking.) The managers are the same age and have the same preoccupation.
A little background on Federal retirement regs is in order; I'll keep it short. Until the mid-80s, all Federal workers were in the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS). It's a sweet deal. We don't pay Social Security taxes (we won't get it either, unless we earned it somewhere else), and have 7% deducted from our pay. If one has 30 years in at age 55, one can retire at about 60% of the average of one's last three years pay. Work longer, and that percentage goes up 2% a year. There are complications, but that's basically it. In 1987, all new employees were enrolled in FERS (Federal Employees Retirement System), and the existing employees were given a chance to switch--only a few did. FERS is still quite generous. SS is deducted, and retirees get it. There is an additional pension. And there is a matching contribution of up to 5% of salary to the Thrift Savings Plan, our 401k. The major drawback is that full retirement comes at age 65.
So, you see where I'm headed. The Federal workforce has been downsizing for decades, meaning that we don't have a lot of younger people. The people that make up the bulk of the civil service are the last of the CSRS employees and have been thoroughly disgusted with the poor quality of management and Presidential leadership. Every President from Carter on has run against Washington and has made it a priority to downsize the civil service, farming out our jobs to private contractors that we know damned well don't do it as well (because we end up cleaning up their messes). We eagerly anticipate leaving, and many come back as contractors for a few years at a pay increase (plus we get the pension--many easily double their income).
Why is this bad? Look at FEMA. One of their big problems was the loss of experienced CSRSers who could not stand the arrogant incompetence of Allbaugh and Brown. It didn't have the depth of experience to cope with the next big emergency. In my own agency, I see a dropoff in quality and quantity of work. The executives have for many years been awful, and many had one eye on their future with contractors after they went through the revolving door. But now we're losing people right and left, and in their last years the commitment level drops too as they anticipate their exits. I find it easier all the time to go half speed, and I work on the stuff that interests me first. (Fortunately, there is a good bit of such work.) And I've become one of those guys who thinks daily of how great it would be to retire at the ripe old age of 55, when I can still ride my bike (it's beautiful out today) and am healthy. Money is fine, but time is what life is made of and spending it here seems more and more like wasting it.
But enough about me. The only way out of this is to recruit, and to show that the nation values its workforce. We're paid enough, and the benefits are great. What we need most is decent management (next post) and leadership. John Kennedy made people in government feel as though what they did mattered. Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush made us feel as though we were part of the problem (though Reagan and the second Bush were by far the worst offenders, they all acted as though they were ambivalent about being our boss). The President needs to stick up for us against meddling Congressmen and greedy contractors, and in return demand commitment and quality. Most Feds would cheer if a few thousand of the worst slackers were fired--we have to do their work in addition to our own.
Well, here's the article that scooped me.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050100631.html
OK, how big a deal can it be, you might ask? It's just a bunch of overpaid bureaucrats, after all. There are more where they came from, right?
Well, yeah, there are more. But the govt isn't looking for them (see below) and doesn't make it easy to join. There has also been a twenty year push for contracting out governmental functions, which I am convinced has inhibited hiring initiatives. Consequently, when I walk the halls here in the IRS offices in New Carrollton (which I sometimes refer to as "Castle Greyskull"), most of the people I see are over 50. The number one social activity is retirement parties, and the number one topic of conversation is how long we have to work before we can go out on full retirement. (Nine and a half months, though I almost certainly won't leave as soon as I'm eligible--thanks for asking.) The managers are the same age and have the same preoccupation.
A little background on Federal retirement regs is in order; I'll keep it short. Until the mid-80s, all Federal workers were in the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS). It's a sweet deal. We don't pay Social Security taxes (we won't get it either, unless we earned it somewhere else), and have 7% deducted from our pay. If one has 30 years in at age 55, one can retire at about 60% of the average of one's last three years pay. Work longer, and that percentage goes up 2% a year. There are complications, but that's basically it. In 1987, all new employees were enrolled in FERS (Federal Employees Retirement System), and the existing employees were given a chance to switch--only a few did. FERS is still quite generous. SS is deducted, and retirees get it. There is an additional pension. And there is a matching contribution of up to 5% of salary to the Thrift Savings Plan, our 401k. The major drawback is that full retirement comes at age 65.
So, you see where I'm headed. The Federal workforce has been downsizing for decades, meaning that we don't have a lot of younger people. The people that make up the bulk of the civil service are the last of the CSRS employees and have been thoroughly disgusted with the poor quality of management and Presidential leadership. Every President from Carter on has run against Washington and has made it a priority to downsize the civil service, farming out our jobs to private contractors that we know damned well don't do it as well (because we end up cleaning up their messes). We eagerly anticipate leaving, and many come back as contractors for a few years at a pay increase (plus we get the pension--many easily double their income).
Why is this bad? Look at FEMA. One of their big problems was the loss of experienced CSRSers who could not stand the arrogant incompetence of Allbaugh and Brown. It didn't have the depth of experience to cope with the next big emergency. In my own agency, I see a dropoff in quality and quantity of work. The executives have for many years been awful, and many had one eye on their future with contractors after they went through the revolving door. But now we're losing people right and left, and in their last years the commitment level drops too as they anticipate their exits. I find it easier all the time to go half speed, and I work on the stuff that interests me first. (Fortunately, there is a good bit of such work.) And I've become one of those guys who thinks daily of how great it would be to retire at the ripe old age of 55, when I can still ride my bike (it's beautiful out today) and am healthy. Money is fine, but time is what life is made of and spending it here seems more and more like wasting it.
But enough about me. The only way out of this is to recruit, and to show that the nation values its workforce. We're paid enough, and the benefits are great. What we need most is decent management (next post) and leadership. John Kennedy made people in government feel as though what they did mattered. Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush made us feel as though we were part of the problem (though Reagan and the second Bush were by far the worst offenders, they all acted as though they were ambivalent about being our boss). The President needs to stick up for us against meddling Congressmen and greedy contractors, and in return demand commitment and quality. Most Feds would cheer if a few thousand of the worst slackers were fired--we have to do their work in addition to our own.
Well, here's the article that scooped me.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050100631.html
Civil Service Steps Up Recruitment
Ads
Set to Appear as Survey Finds Students Have Little Knowledge of Federal
Jobs
By Zachary A. Goldfarb and Christopher LeeWashington
Post Staff WritersTuesday, May 2, 2006; Page A19http://www.usajobs.gov/ . The ads come as the federal government faces an unprecedented wave of retirements among the baby-boom generation, with about 60 percent of the government's 1.8 million workers eligible to retire over the next 10 years.
Civil service leaders announced a media campaign yesterday to lure talented applicants to the federal workforce at the same time that a new study says the government needs to do a
more effective job of recruiting college students for federal jobs.
Linda M. Springer, director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the agency will
begin airing four 30-second television ads featuring federal employees touting
the work they do and encouraging viewers to explore job opportunities at
"We often call it the retirement tsunami," Springer said. "We've got to get ready for
it."However, the new study by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, scheduled for release today, shows that federal officials have often failed to reach out to a group of people
who might be expected to fill the jobs of departing civil servants: university students.
The partnership, whose mission is to entice talented people to consider federal careers, found that university students -- as measured by the responses of juniors, seniors and engineering
graduate students at six universities -- say they lack the knowledge of federal jobs and
internships necessary to map out career decisions.
Specifically, 54 percent of students said they did not feel knowledgeable about federal
opportunities, compared with 13 percent who said they were very or extremely
knowledgeable. Forty-two percent of students said they were very interested in
federal jobs, slightly less than the percentage who said they were interested in
private-sector spots.Students said their biggest concern about taking a job in government was too much bureaucracy.
The OPM ads and the report come as the difficulty of maintaining a skilled federal workforce is building. The problem is especially critical at the uppermost levels of career bureaucrats,
with 90 percent of Senior Executive Service members eligible to retire in the next decade.
Max Stier, president of the partnership, said the next generation of federal workers will think differently about their career paths than the generation that is about to retire. "The generation that's leaving" believed in a system in which "they came into government for lifetime
employment," Stier said. "The model no longer works today. This is a problem
the government has never had to address before."
Springer acknowledged the new demands yesterday, saying the government must offer more flexible work arrangements. "We can't just bank on employees today in the 21st century that
want to come work in a bricks-and-mortar building and stay there for 20, 30
or 40 years," she said. "It's not going to happen."
The partnership's report urges the government to create substantive relationships with colleges and universities, pool resources of agencies to recruit for certain careers, stress
the public-service component of government work and tailor recruitment with as
much face-to-face effort as possible. Springer also said OPM and other
agencies must redouble their efforts to simplify the red-tape-laden federal
hiring process, which is notorious for leaving job applicants in the dark for
months. And OPM is encouraging workers who could retire over the next few years
to stick around longer, perhaps through new part-time arrangements.
An area of acute concern is workers with technical skills. The Defense Department
needs to hire 6,000 engineers annually, while various agencies need 2,000
information technology experts, according to the partnership. About 12,500 new
air traffic controllers will be needed over the next 10 years. At the same time,
scientific proficiency in U.S. schools is not keeping pace with that in foreign
schools.
"The numbers are dramatic," said Doris Hausser, an OPM senior policy
adviser. "The university systems of foreign competitors are generating engineers
and scientists at a much higher rate than we are. That's not to say we don't
have good engineering schools, but what needs to happen is for federal agencies
to establish good working relationships with the departments at some of these
schools."
The partnership's report said engineering students tend to be less interested in federal jobs than others, with only a quarter having actually sought information about them.
The report reflects the views of 3,200 students who responded to a survey sent to about 31,000 students at Clark Atlanta University, George Washington University, Louisiana State, Ohio State,
Stanford and the University of New Mexico. At Ohio State, only language and
engineering students were surveyed...
Friday, March 24, 2006
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.
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.
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Configuration Management for Earthlings
Configuration Management (CM) or change management is one of those mom-and-apple-pie things that no reasonable person will say much against. Of course we have to manage our resources in a documented fashion. But the way it's described in the texts and by consultants makes it seem like an unattainable dream and a maintenance nightmare all at once. They'll tell you you have to document your assets to the nth degree, and surround the entire process with elaborate "artifacts" (their fancy name for documents). Project management is similar. I once had an instructor tell us in class that good project management takes about 80% of all the effort involved in a project. While that may be good news for project management consultants, I think it's insane. No one can afford that, so no one does it, and still produce what they intended to. But while we will have projects we must manage, we can evade managing our configuration. It's ugly, but it happens. I know because I work in a data processing division with a $280M yearly budget that has not done configuration management at a high level.
Oh, we control program transmittals. But that is one of the few areas in which close tabs are kept by management of what we have out there and how it gets changed, at a level higher than the site. The technical guys are pretty good about controlling what they're in charge of and keeping it running. But our executive has no repeatable method for making decisions about what mainframes to buy or eliminate, or what sort of contract to sign this year (if any) for disk upgrades or new software. I have it on good authority that she recently lamented that she was "tired of making all these decisions by myself". Well, so are a lot of other people. She needs help. No one is knowledgeable enough make those decisions by herself (and she is definitely not an exception).
In a couple weeks, I'll know if my suggestions for jumping into CM at her level are going to be favorably received. I doubt it, but I can hope that I'm wrong--or that she is replaced soon. The charter she approved for the configuration control board had her making all the decisions, and she hasn't even implemented that. The budget is always cloaked in secrecy, and no one knows for sure what our priorities are or how much is available. There are always questionable contracts signed in late September (at the end of the fiscal year) to spend money no one else knew was there.
I'll post more on this. But for now, I have two fears: that our executive will sabotage any effort to do true CM bcause she is jealous of her unchecked power; and that the CM nazis in my agency will use the perfect to bludgeon the good into a bloody pulp, forcing us to spend all our time writing "Requirements Traceability Matrices" and the like before we can even start. You should see what they require for an "audit" or "assessment" of or CM process. Well, here's part of what they want to see:
Change Forms / Documents
Requirements Specifications
RTM
Engineering Drawings
Interface Control Documents
Schematics
CS Structure Chart
Other Technical Documentation
Deployment Management Plan
Transition to Support Plan
Computer Operations Handbook
System Test Plan
System Test Descriptions
System Test Report
Product Baseline Documentation
SW VDD and/or HW Release Record
Post Implementation Review Report
You get the idea. I'm not saying this stuff isn't all good to have. We do have some of it. I'm saying that when we're in a situation in which there is no CM process for spending hundreds of millions of dollars, it isn't helpful to demand the impossible of any attempt to get a handle on that situation. I'm for just starting, and worrying later about getting all those documents written. Even if many of them never do get produced, we'll be a lot better off than we are now.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Oh, we control program transmittals. But that is one of the few areas in which close tabs are kept by management of what we have out there and how it gets changed, at a level higher than the site. The technical guys are pretty good about controlling what they're in charge of and keeping it running. But our executive has no repeatable method for making decisions about what mainframes to buy or eliminate, or what sort of contract to sign this year (if any) for disk upgrades or new software. I have it on good authority that she recently lamented that she was "tired of making all these decisions by myself". Well, so are a lot of other people. She needs help. No one is knowledgeable enough make those decisions by herself (and she is definitely not an exception).
In a couple weeks, I'll know if my suggestions for jumping into CM at her level are going to be favorably received. I doubt it, but I can hope that I'm wrong--or that she is replaced soon. The charter she approved for the configuration control board had her making all the decisions, and she hasn't even implemented that. The budget is always cloaked in secrecy, and no one knows for sure what our priorities are or how much is available. There are always questionable contracts signed in late September (at the end of the fiscal year) to spend money no one else knew was there.
I'll post more on this. But for now, I have two fears: that our executive will sabotage any effort to do true CM bcause she is jealous of her unchecked power; and that the CM nazis in my agency will use the perfect to bludgeon the good into a bloody pulp, forcing us to spend all our time writing "Requirements Traceability Matrices" and the like before we can even start. You should see what they require for an "audit" or "assessment" of or CM process. Well, here's part of what they want to see:
Change Forms / Documents
Requirements Specifications
RTM
Engineering Drawings
Interface Control Documents
Schematics
CS Structure Chart
Other Technical Documentation
Deployment Management Plan
Transition to Support Plan
Computer Operations Handbook
System Test Plan
System Test Descriptions
System Test Report
Product Baseline Documentation
SW VDD and/or HW Release Record
Post Implementation Review Report
You get the idea. I'm not saying this stuff isn't all good to have. We do have some of it. I'm saying that when we're in a situation in which there is no CM process for spending hundreds of millions of dollars, it isn't helpful to demand the impossible of any attempt to get a handle on that situation. I'm for just starting, and worrying later about getting all those documents written. Even if many of them never do get produced, we'll be a lot better off than we are now.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Sorry for the Hiatus
It's mostly laziness that I haven't kept this blog up. But I've also landed in a job here that has some chance of allowing me to change the way part of IRS does business. I'll be crafting a configuration management structure that may (if the execs allow it) improve the decisionmaking around here ("here" being the organization that runs the mainframes and servers our agency uses). Hope springs eternal. I'll resist the temptation to bitch about the things I don't like about how we do things unless they shed light on government-wide problems as I see it.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Federal Government Contracting
This is one of my biggest complaints about the Federal govt. Today's Washington Post has an important article that has implications far beyond the FAA.
This lack of discipline has cost the taxpayer many millions of dollars. I have specific examples, many of which I have shared with TIGTA, but I'll refrain from citing them for legal reasons. None of the recent ones, to my knowledge, involves the sort of bribery shown in the FAA case. But it's still wrong, isn't it? COs are not doing their jobs, and executives are practicing gross incompetence. It's gotten to the point that nearly everyone just throws up their hands and claims that there's nothing anyone can do about it. Actually, it's been at that point for about 15 years. But it's bullshit. A President who cared could turn it around, but we haven't had one for a very long time. Instead, we have a destructive alliance between a log-rolling Congress, self-interested executive branch executives, lazy employees, and greedy contractors. No one is effectively advocating for good government or for the taxpayer. (The taxpayers have always been lazy about things like this anyway. I don't blame them too much--it's complicated. Even the Halliburton outrage seems to sail right over their heads.)
I'll return to this in future posts. It's big; we're talking about not only the wasted money, but the lost opportunity for doing things right.
My agency, the IRS, is not immune from contracting problems. I have referred some practices to our Inspector General (TIGTA), which resulted in a scathing report but no change in actual contracting procedures. I have even seen the wife of an executive being a high-profile employee of a contractor her husband steered a training contract to, a very similar situation to the one involving Cirillo at the FAA. (This occurred about 12 years ago, as I recall. The executive in question was canned for that and other sharp practices.) But the big waste is not due to payoffs to govt decisionmakers. Rather, it is due to perverse incentives and laziness. It's just easier to avoid competition and to give the contractors what they want, because that's what Congress seems to want. Add to this the natural desire for the private sector to make as much money as possible for the least expense and effort possible, and the push by the last several administrations to reduce the Federal workforce and hire contractors to do govt functions, and you get the situation we have today. From that same article:FAA Orders a Closer Look at Contracts
By Sara Kehaulani GooWashington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 14, 2005; Page A01
Debra Srite got an odd phone call a month after starting her new job at the Federal Aviation Administration last year.
A contractor told her that he needed several thousand dollars more from the agency because he had run through nearly all the money allowed under his company's program. When Srite, a by-the-book contracting officer who cites the United States Code from memory, pressed him to provide a reason for the new money, she said he wouldn't cooperate.
"It was like he was in charge and he was surprised I asked for that verification," she said. Among the red flags Srite says she found in the $16 million contract were invoices for an unapproved trip to Las Vegas and an unexplained lease for a Porsche Boxster. She also learned that Crown had hired the wife of a top FAA official and that the company later was ordered by that official to keep his wife on staff after the contract ended. A computer software system the firm was supposed to develop for the FAA failed many government tests and was never used, according to FAA documents...
The call prompted Srite to dig into the FAA's records on the project. What she and a co-worker found out about the $16 million contract raised concerns about how the FAA handles $1.3 billion in such programs with small businesses...
Experts in contracting law say projects like Crown's are meant to save the government money but instead may add to costs. So-called support services contracts allow the FAA to award initial contracts to a short list of pre-qualified small companies and then add tasks amounting to as much as several million dollars without bidding. Such awards are often open-ended or loosely defined jobs to provide technical expertise, consultation or additional labor hours on programs ranging from developing a new software system to running a computer help desk.
Sometimes, such contracts do not include firm deadlines and in most cases they lack specific performance standards. The contractor is paid based on whether it supplied the required hours of service. In some cases, an FAA employee will retire from the government and soon after begin similar work for a contractor for more money, raising the questions of whether the government is really saving money by using the contractor.
This lack of discipline has cost the taxpayer many millions of dollars. I have specific examples, many of which I have shared with TIGTA, but I'll refrain from citing them for legal reasons. None of the recent ones, to my knowledge, involves the sort of bribery shown in the FAA case. But it's still wrong, isn't it? COs are not doing their jobs, and executives are practicing gross incompetence. It's gotten to the point that nearly everyone just throws up their hands and claims that there's nothing anyone can do about it. Actually, it's been at that point for about 15 years. But it's bullshit. A President who cared could turn it around, but we haven't had one for a very long time. Instead, we have a destructive alliance between a log-rolling Congress, self-interested executive branch executives, lazy employees, and greedy contractors. No one is effectively advocating for good government or for the taxpayer. (The taxpayers have always been lazy about things like this anyway. I don't blame them too much--it's complicated. Even the Halliburton outrage seems to sail right over their heads.)
I'll return to this in future posts. It's big; we're talking about not only the wasted money, but the lost opportunity for doing things right.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
What I'll Be Doing Here
I'm not entirely sure, but my intention is to sound off on broadly work-related issues. I'm a Federal bureaucrat, and there's a lot going on in Washington that I don't like. It will be a little bit political, but Presidents from both parties have been committing some gross executive branch malpractice, so I'm not going to just bash one party. When I get time, I'll post my concerns about what's happening to the executive branch agencies that so many people depend on whether they realize it or not. In my opinion, we're facing serious challenges that were largely created by incompetence and inattention, but that have some ideological and self-interested components. I have lots of ideas on how to meet those challenges, too.
By the way, I do have a fairly active online life. This is my first blog, but I have a LiveJournal and have been a prolific contributor to several bulletin boards for more than eight years. The recent EZboards fiasco permanently erased well over a million words (by a very conservative count) that I wrote, not that I have any illusions about the likelihood they'd have been read again. I don't expect anybody else to read this blog either. If I like what it develops into, I'll retitle it and try to promote it.
By the way, I do have a fairly active online life. This is my first blog, but I have a LiveJournal and have been a prolific contributor to several bulletin boards for more than eight years. The recent EZboards fiasco permanently erased well over a million words (by a very conservative count) that I wrote, not that I have any illusions about the likelihood they'd have been read again. I don't expect anybody else to read this blog either. If I like what it develops into, I'll retitle it and try to promote it.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Why Not the Best?
I may be the last person to have a blog, but I won't be denied. My genius must be shared.
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