Information analyst

1981 to 1984

Overcoming obstacles: MsDonnell Douglas was losing hundreds-of-thousands of dollars a day in deferred revenue because they weren’t “responding to changes fast enough”. This meant they weren’t getting contract revisions finished in time to meet milestone payments. To get a handle on this they started poaching high-level execs from the auto industry. The execs assembled a team of Industrial Engineers and IT Analysts. I was chosen because I happen to be there the day my boss asked me to attend a meeting with him. See what we could make of it We listened to the former auto execs talking about the concept of ‘Operation Sequence Planning’. It sounded like they were saying they wanted to: “show increases in the number of work-units completed without increasing the number of actual units completed.” This didn’t make any sense. In an effort to understand, I paraphrased back: “it sounds like you’re looking for more information about what’s in work ..(?)” Now everyone at the table was staring at me and I didn’t know whether they were about to yell at me for impertinence, irrelevance or stupidity. I felt the blood drain from my face. Then they shouted: “THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR !!” When the blood returned; I calmly responded: “Oh yeah, we can do that.” Now my boss was staring at me in disbelief.