In this post:
We reflect on the transition from routine maintenance work to acquisitions project work.
Life has changed a lot for me over the years of my professional life thus far.
I was an aircraft maintenance guy over a decade ago. I showed up to work on a given day, received my to-do list, and got busy. At the end of the work day, I reported what got done and what remained to do.
The work was often predictable. It involved a lot of waiting for an aircraft to electronically check itself. It rarely involved too much thinking. I simply needed to get feedback from the system and do the prescribed corrective action. Sometimes, all I needed to do was pass the prescribed correction to the next shift.
These days, I show up for work with a loose concept of what needs to be accomplished over a multi-month window of time. As best as I can guess what needs to be done, I work to prepare for some milestone or another. Almost nothing is very well understood by more than maybe five people at a given time.
Sometimes it feels like nothing happens until a milestone actually arrives. At that point, suddenly all the nothing I spent hours wracking my brain over yields a solid result. The feedback from events often yields more questions than feelings of success or illumination.
My experience as a maintainer is an example of life in operations. The work I did supported a greater strategic effort, though I barely had any awareness of it. That strategic effort executed tactical ventures to pursue its ultimate mission.
My current experience as an acquisition officer is an example of strategic life. The work I support is a multi-year cast of the die in the grand scheme of national competition. The work my team does attempts to shape that die as nicely as we can to fall in our favor.
Let’s consider some differences about my own behaviors as an operational agent versus now as a strategic agent.
–
Stability versus Adaptability
The game of aircraft maintenance sometimes runs into anomalies, but for an older (‘80s) aircraft, I would argue that 95% of the game is solved. When we ran into a problem, the solution was likely a flowchart review away.
Getting better at the job meant being able to satisfactorily complete more of it in a single shift.
The games of acquisition are often unique in every instance. The acquisition of business systems, weapons, aircraft, tanks, ships, or software applications varies not only from category to category, but even within each category from product to product.
The reason the acquisition even begins might cease to exist or cease to be relevant by the time the acquisition is underway. The genesis of one acquisition might morph or split into other related acquisitions.
Getting better at my job generally means becoming better able to absorb, adapt, and synthesize new information rapidly.
–
Training versus Networking
As a maintainer, I was introduced to my supervisor and their team. They taught me how to do the work we did. I assisted training the new maintainers that followed behind me. While I met other people across my unit, I very well could have succeeded without talking to most other teams.
While the aircraft depended on each of our unique teams accomplishing their work, their work was not really relevant to our work.
What mattered most was becoming individually excellent.
In acquisition, I was introduced to my supervisor whose responsibilities depended on work I did but whose knowledge barely understood what that work entailed. To accomplish my work successfully, I had to practically cold call other people throughout my office, outside of my office, and even outside of the Department of Defense.
My work was and still is impossible to execute successfully without the expertise of many other teams. What is most important is having a sufficiently deep network.
–
Short-Term versus Long-Term
In maintenance, I basically never had to think about what might happen in a few weeks outside of seasonal changes – and all that changed was my decision to wear different clothes.
Also, the work of maintenance from a maintainer’s perspective is usually reactive: a weapon system was acquired and the wear, tear, and use of that system demands restorative actions. If a probe goes bad, we replace it with a good one. If we are lucky enough that nothing demands maintenance attention at the time, we happily read a book or dawdle until the next jet comes back home.
Once you are trained to do the job at your appropriate skill level, there’s not much to improve upon.
In acquisition, events cascade upon one another from political, international, industrial, academic, and other forces. Our teams may or may not be able to influence any of it, but we still have to work to prepare for the various results that fall out from the environment.
While the genesis of any system’s acquisition might be a reaction to something, much of the work is proactive. The Department of Defense is working to shorten timelines, but weapons are developed years in advance of their expected need (and have often still been fielded late to need).
Once trained, you know barely enough to go ask questions to develop that network – it’s important to read and develop better questions that help you figure out who to seek out.
–
This was more of a brain dump post, though I’d welcome some discussion on these undercooked thoughts.
72 Airman's Writings 