So why speak?

photo credit: patrick dentler

Sometimes one risks more by not speaking than by speaking.  Suppose the objection is saved for another day, and it’s a good objection. People will then ask, “Why didn’t you raise this objection previously?” The person is then shifty and opportunistic.

Principles still matter. If one is solid in their beliefs, others can count on that person when they want to advance something that is aligned with those beliefs.

Some things should be obstructed. I will vote against nearly every tax increase until kingdom come. Is that obstructionist?  Heck, yeah! Is that good? You’d better believe it!

One does have to be careful. Having lost, the minority should not take the results personally. The initiative, once passed, should only be defeated again at the ballot box: not by sabotage. One doesn’t win any points saying something isn’t going to work, then take steps to ensure something doesn’t work.

In the meantime we educate, advocate, and pray things go better the next time.

This is bound to be quite the task — faith comes by hearing, after all.

The study found most of the courses were explicitly devotional with almost exclusively Christian, usually Protestant, perspectives.

It also found that most were taught by teachers with no academic training in biblical, religious or theological studies and who were not familiar with the issues of separation of church and state.

“Some classes promote creation science. Some classes denigrate Judaism. Some classes explicitly encourage students to convert to Christianity or to adopt Christian devotional practices,” Mr. Chancey said. “This is all well-documented, and the board knows it.”

There is enough diversity within Christian thought that I’m not sure I could trust that just any “Christian” could represent Christianity properly. I would rather not have to undo fun things like millenialism or Christian Zionism.

I would be curious as to how a literature teacher would treat the Bible, without getting into truth claims.

This fall, my girls will be enrolled in a Lutheran private preschool where Bible verses are part of the curriculum. If this were to happen in a public school, families of other religions could request memorization of other religious books. Many religions would demand their fair share, paid for with your tax dollars, and they would have different standards of what offended them. Our religious teaching is best left to our homes, our churches, and church-sponsored private schools.

If you don’t have that fortune, then you’re an indirect expense. You might be a payroll clerk, an instructor, a janitor, a scheduler, an executive, et cetera. If you get into that situation where something you did saves the company a fistful of dollars or causes the company to gain work, it’s a real treat.

It is usually difficult to document the return on investment for indirect expenses. Managers know they need them, but they can’t predictably scale their indirect employees depending on how much revenue they want to pull in. They are a lagging economic indicator, reacting to demand from what is going on.

photo credit: lumaxart

Unfortunately for a large company, many indirect employees are insulated from knowledge about their positive and negative contributions to the bottom line. They don’t see the point of their labor. I think managers can see the resulting attitude pretty easily, but they may misdiagnose the cause. Instead of giving personnel tools to maximize their profitability, they insist on pieces of flair or in our case, a corporate campaign.

The first part of this campaign consisted of an email with an interactive animation. The user could click on a Sharpie, a can of spray paint, or a megaphone. Each started an animation that told the user something was coming, and we were to stay tuned. We weren’t actually told what was coming.

This motivation so far is actually a downer, given that our department recently let go seven talented individuals in April. I don’t know how much this campaign costs, but we went through a rebranding campaign several years ago where consultants got a nice chuck of change. Maybe we could have kept some assets on the payroll.

Real morale is boosted by good results. When KBR was part of Halliburton, they entered into a contract to provide logistics to 15,000 people, and they ended up serving 153,000. Knowing that the software I teach reduces Days Sales Outstanding, and each DSO is millions of dollars for North America, is a good thing. Camps reporting millions in revenue for the previous quarter is an excellent thing. Indirects knowing how they contribute to the bottom line and how that bottom line rewards them is the best thing one can do for morale.

A lot of good has been done. Everyone’s been taught enough to have an idea how to use this software going forward. Each area is different. It is more effective to make people think about what they are doing rather than just laying down a routine.

Yesterday I was told by one of the supervisors that I needed to be paid more money. I’ll take that. If they use our software properly, they’ll cut costs, and I’ll get more in the end-of-year bonus. A $50 Corporate Reward STAR Card would be nice, too.

Alaska is remote enough that it is treated corporately like another country. The autonomy lets management make its own deals with customers, which is good, but the bureaucratic and geographic isolation makes it easy to ignore and difficult to assist.

The HAL base camp like most operations up here is ISO 14001 certified. BP demands certification from all the companies it contracts. It meets and exceeds expectations to minimize environmental impact. People who train for Prudhoe Bay not only get cold weather training but environmental training that they can take everywhere else.

If I were to give a hotel report, it would go something like this (I always write hotel reports past tense):

The room had two beds, each with a long twin mattress over a standard twin box springs. Each bed had a reading lamp and a shelf for kleenexes. Four closets and four drawers made it possible to house two men on two hitches. Sheets were changed and rooms were cleaned every other day by contracted staff. The room had no air conditioner (go figure), but the heater worked fine.

There was cable service in every room, but residents had to bring their own televisions. Each floor had a television lounge, and the third floor had extra subwoofers to turn it into a “movie room.” During the summer, the TV rooms were the darkest places around. Each room had an ethernet cable, but mine didn’t work. Wireless internet access was available and functional, but the corporate firewall prevented me from using IRC, Skype, and other services. The firewall also forced me to upload pictures to the blog in a different way.

The bathroom on each floor was spacious, if one didn’t mind sharing. Four showers, three sinks, five restrooms. Water pressure was good and remained hot, but some of the shower faucets functioned in reverse. Attached to the bathroom was a laundry room which had two washers, two dryers, and a mud sink. The washers had automatic soap dispensers that measured out the right amount. Bleach and other detergents were forbidden due to water conservation. The dryers did their job, but the automatic drying cycles didn’t work. The timers had to be used.

The quality of the food served in the miniature cafeteria was pretty good. We didn’t get a lot of seafood, but the Prime Rib night, the Mexican night, and Fry-days were good. It had been a step up from their previous cook who couldn’t quite cook the chicken all the way through. There was no possibility for food storage in the rooms, but refrigerators were available. Breakfast ended at 7am each morning; I could have used another hour.

I did get to eat at two other places: Oooguruk Island and the base camp of ConocoPhillips. Conoco is huge, and the night I was there they had an all out Thanksgiving feast. Apparently BP has a nice facility too, as all HAL employees with the proper security clearances were invited one night.

The facility had a half-court indoor basketball gym and an exercise room with two treadmills, an elliptical, nautilus, and free weights. Everything was in working order but the wall-mounted TV, whose power button was nearly worn out.

Base camp was a bumpy 5 miles from the airport, but once I was settled in, it was easy to go to work each morning.

The contract services provided by ESS were friendly and professional. Bathrooms were kept clean, the residence floors were always swept, and the cafeteria was always clean.

I got no frequent stay points for staying at the base camp, but on the other hand I didn’t have to charge a lot on my expenses. I was able to keep a room by myself the whole time. Tomorrow the other trainer comes, and we’ll share the room until I leave Wednesday.

Cynthia Tsao, Ph.D. in the College of Engineering at UC, gave “Lean & Green Construction: A Primer on Lean Project Delivery and How It Supports Sustainability.” Handouts consisted of her PowerPoint slides, and the 3×3 contact sheets were hard to read at times. Tsao was well-versed in her topic and has been involved with several engineering and construction publications.

Tsao’s presentation reminded me of some of the Kaizen initiatives that Halliburton is going through, and some of the ideas Tsao presented can be used in any multiple-step operation, e.g. computer programming.

Notes:
“Lean Construction” implies initiative is for construction only. Tsao prefers “Lead Project Delivery,” an entire process including procurement, installation, and engineering.

Most project owners report their projects being completed either on-time or slightly longer than planned. Construction costs are skyrocketing, especially in the health-care industry, where projects are quick, uncertain, expensive, and high-risk. Productivity is down; the construction industry reported a 57% waste of productive time in 2004. The United States averages 4.77 workplace fatalities and 1588 workplace nonfatal injuries per day. All of this happens because project participants have incentive to sacrifice overall project performance to benefit their own assignment’s productivity.

Traditionally, participants are paid by percent complete. This provides incentive to finish the easiest and largest tasks first, leaving difficult, small volumes last. Projects tend to stall near the end. Project controls are reactive rather than proactive, rather than looking forward to hand-offs where one project ends and another begins.

We tend to break down projects into small, manageable chunks, but doing so introduces a “leak” of work at the intersection of chunks. Scheduling becomes elaborate and outdated. Specialty contractors and suppliers complete their work according to when they want to be paid and when your project outranks other priorities.

The Lean Project Delivery Approach by contrast avoids large batches of work. Lean Project Delivery typically begins with a “Last Planner,” the person or team that gives assignments to crews. Projects are designed from Finish to Start to identify all hand-offs. The Last Planner System reduces the tendency for people to over-promise and under-deliver in a particular task.

Results: The Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center had no 11^th hour design revisions. The project reported 1.45 incidents per 200,000 work hours with an industrial average of 5.9. Completion was planned for October 1, 2007, but the site completed on August 15. The hospital took its first Operating Room case 13 days before construction was to have ended.

NR Note: Heathrow’s Terminal 5 was also cited as a positive case study, the first civil project in 40 years in the UK to be delivered on time. Unfortunately Terminal 5 has had post-construction problems.

More Information: Lean Construction Institute and International Group for Lean Construction.

The first class Friday morning was “Engineering Education in the 21^st Century,” given by the Dean of Engineering at the University of Cincinnati, Carlo Montemagno, Ph.D.

Montemagno had no handouts but gave a good presentation and knew his material. Here are my notes, transcribed on the fly:

Cooperative learning, incorporating on the job experience, began at UC in 1906. Students bond more with their co-op employer than with their alma mater. Bachelor’s graduates usually have 1-½ years of job experience. Two-thirds of co-ops hire with their employers after graduation. In 2000 the ABET recommended universities create a Capstone Design Experience. It is intended to impress the same kind of experience as on-the-job training, but it’s not the same.

Engineering is traditionally a weed-out major. Students would flunk out of Engineering and become Business majors, making tons of money in the process. UC had a 48% graduation rate in Engineering, despite being the pick of Engineering students for the state of Ohio. ACT math scores were a poor indicator of performance. Better prediction was obtained from the first semester grade of Calculus I. UC created support classes to improving math scores, and their graduation rates improved. The most creative students tended to flunk out, and now UC is keeping them.

Two aspects of life-long learning:

Life as Engineer

Engineers change jobs more frequently in the United States than in other countries. American employers see continuing education as a benefit to the employee, while Japanese employers see it as investment in the company. Continuing Education has more success when there is personal involvement, when it is self-initiated, when it is evaluated by the learner, and when it is pervasive on the learner, applying to their present job so that the information sticks and is useful. Engineers need to have a career plan and be aggressive in maintaining knowledge.

Problem: It is hard to assess how a person will perform on the job, before they are on the job. Online learning is cost prohibitive: content creation costs are high, and professors may be paid for the creation of online content but not for the replay of content. Colleges are working on bringing costs down.

Personal Development

Continued learning helps people avoid cognitive decline. An Engineering degree is often the first degree earned in a family, leading to improved quality of life for students and descendants. Engineers improve the human condition through scholarship.

As universities soak up Research and Development dollars, the undergraduate student becomes less important. 28% of research money goes to 20 universities; 38%, to 30. This leaves littled for the remained of the 217 total research universities.

U.S. News and World Report exacerbates the focus away from the undergrad by evaluating colleges based on money pulled in per professor and name recognition. Money is spent on advertisements and flyers at the expense of scholarships. Colleges need to renew their commitment to undergrads, engage in partnerships with colleges that do not get the research dollars, disengage from the U.S. News reporting system, and change the procedure for federal grant money. A mediocre idea with a great scientist’s name on it has a better chance of funding than a great idea by a scientist with little recognition. A double-blind peer review of papers would help.

UC is returning its focus to the undergrad with its “Ticket to Ride” program.

One student, probably one of the most brilliant minds of our Chemical Engineering class (seriously, no sarcasm), tried to get the good doctor’s attention, first by raising his hand, then gently “ahem”-ing, and then surprising the class with a very rude snap of the fingers.

Finishing his proof about 5 minutes later, Dr. Roach turned to the class to take questions. The student asked, “Why not just use Redlich-Kwong?”

Dr. Roach was for the first and only time that year flummoxed and annoyed. He full-well knew what the Redlich-Kwong equations of state were, but the conversation was in his view irrelevant. It was like asking someone teaching basic multiplication, “Why not just use exponents and logarithms?”

But the student persisted. Redlich-Kwong was way superior. It gave better results. It accounted for different materials. Why did we waste a day and a half with the derivation of an inferior gas law?

The kindly old man kept his smiling poker face, but his voice betrayed his anger at the insolent one. He dismissed the entire class right then and there, only 20 minutes in. Most of the class thought it was cool, but I thought it was a missed opportunity. The problem lay within how each method was generated.

The first method, the ideal gas law, was first derived in 1834. It used very few assumptions and some rigorous mathematics to predict how gases would behave under certain conditions. If it were to prove somehow false (which it is, for very high and very low pressures and temperatures), then the fault wasn’t in the measurements, but in the assumptions. A deviance from the “ideal” was an opportunity for discovery.

The second method, published 125 years later, used coefficients (fudge factors) to model the behavior of a gas under a wider spread of circumstances. If the equation didn’t match the actual behavior, the constants could be adjusted, potentially covering up new opportunities for discovery.

But I think the great Dr. Roach, still on the MST faculty list, may have found most offensive, beyond the student’s behavior, the desire to get to the “right answer” without appreciating what it took to get there.

This morning the classroom was used for a safety meeting. Someone asked why they needed the projector, and sensing the joviality of the crew, I said, “so he can hook his laptop up and read the slides to you.” The leader admitted that was the case.

Safety meetings provide an instructional quandary: if the employees know how to be safe, the safety meeting is pretty boring. If the employees didn’t know how to be safe, they’d better be new hires! Unsafe people get themselves and others hurt as well as reflect poorly on the company.

Most safety meetings try to overcome the quandary by being bombastic. Turn your cell phones off while pumping gas or you could burst into flames and die! While that possibility may or may not be true, the huge fonts and crazy clip-art of the slide or the reenactment video can border on the ridiculous. The audience becomes focused on the medium rather than the message.

Teaching what should be a review should contain the mandatory material, of course, but it should contain the occasional point where the discussion gets deeper. Challenging the audience to think what they would do in a certain situation is an effective device. Some people open with a bizarre statistic or story, but that tends to get old pretty quickly. Jokes tend to be less effective if you have a repeat audience. If you must use slides or a projector, only turn the lights off near the screen, but never turn the lights off for the whole venue. Let the audience know they are being watched.

Incidentally, there is a parallel between the corporate safety meeting and the church sermon, with the exception being that a lot of church “safety meetings” miss the chief safety points of original sin and justification by faith in what Christ has done for us. The rest of the analogy is left as an exercise to the reader.

When you evaluate, be objective as possible. Can someone who holds a different general opinion of the person you are evaluating see the behavior you see? Objective behavior analysis protects you from harassment charges if you are involved in hiring and firing people.

Having listed an objective behavior, can you suggest an improvement to that behavior? Sometimes the “preferred behavior” that comes immediately to you doesn’t come to other people, or the “preferred behavior” has a nasty disincentive for that person. This helps the person improve as well as helps you identify things that can be changed. It also conveys the sense that you care about the person, even when you may not.

If you have something good to say, emphasize behavior that can be repeated. Otherwise you leave the employee guessing as to what you thought was good, and that can take them in an unexpected direction.

Good: “He will find the answer, if he does not know it himself, and will communicate it quickly back to the users.”

Not so good: “He is smart.”

As your company looks back over the previous year to learn for the next, I wish you the best of success and a good merit raise.

Not only could this be a bad thing because it could get annoying for those around her, but allowed to happen this becomes what we call a self-stimulation, or a “stim.” She uses it to create a mental environment where she can block the environment out and be comfortable. We want her to be able to be comfortable while remaining engaged with her environment.

There are times when a “no” or “don’t do that” is necessary, but a lot of times a “redirection” is a better way to alter undesired behavior. Instead of telling someone what not to do, tell them what and how to do what is desired. It requires more thinking on the enforcer’s part, but the instruction is more valuable.

So I told my older daughter, when she does that, let her do it once, but don’t say it over and over again. Keep giving her new things because she likes what you say. If you run out of new things, have her count numbers, or say the Apostles’ Creed, or ask her what colors something has on it.

When she gets her head around those, there’s always the What does this mean? set…

By the way, one of the things the younger one said under her breath this evening was as plain as day: “and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord.” So the rest of the Creed isn’t out of the question.