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.

Information analyst

1981 to 1984

Overcoming obstacles (continued): When I looked at the database; I was scared shit-less. Now I wondered what I could’ve been thinking. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before. There were records for building aircraft sections that were so large, they took weeks to write and revise. There was no way we were going to keep information like that ‘moving’ the way I’d envisioned. Now my boss was pacing the floor and chain-smoking and the word ‘sell-out’ kept echoing through my head. That reminded me of something else I’d heard in graduate school: a chain of small data packages is faster to process than a large chunk of information. With the help of Industrial Engineers, we broke-up records for completing sections into smaller records for completing ‘operations’ that were easier to revise, store and retrieve from the database. Now Engineers could create custom work packages using a library of ‘component operations’. Information began moving through the system more rapidly and arriving where it was needed on time. Work packages could be revised and published in a day. When I think about it now, what we actually did was create a system that helped make people more ‘flexible and responsive to change’.