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It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

– Publilius Syrus, Maxim 469

[Allow me a brief moment to geek for my first use of my copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. ... Okay, I'm done.]

Today, I was asked to generate a few charts describing our sustaining engineering efforts at work. For those unclear on what it is that I do, I’ll just give you this brief synopsis: when the fit hits the shan in the ground-to-International Space Station cargo world, well … I get splattered. I’m in a project office, and project offices are … interesting places. I was discussing these charts with one of my co-workers on the phone, and our discussion went somewhat like this:

Her: “From the charts I’ve seen, they’re wanting us to justify the manning level we have for the sustaining effort.”

Me: “Well, from a lean-budgets approach, I can see why they want to know. But, we’re a project office …”

Her: “Right! When we have to have an answer, we have to know it right then.”

My mind briefly flashed to that glorious scene from Ron Howard’s wonderful Apollo 13, where an engineering manager walks into a room of pensive engineers and says, “We have to make this“—holding up a round lithium hydroxide canister—”fit into this“—holding up a smaller, squarish LIOH canister—”with this“—dumping a box of available parts onto the table. It’s a great scene, not only because it has some historical truth to it, but because it describes engineering project offices very, very well.

Project offices can be very, very weird places to work. Some days [and even weeks], things will be very slow. Guilt will creep up on you … after you’ve cleared your desk and done all the filing you didn’t get to do last week while you were “making this fit into this with this“, you’re like, “Why am I getting paid to surf the Internet again?” That question is usually famous last words before a veritable flood of red-hot, must-do tasks surges over your desk.

Now, don’t get me wrong … I’m not asking you to pity or to have adulation or anything in between. It’s just the nature of the job … and I love it. I’m sure that some of you are now looking at your screen and doubting my sanity, but … shoot, I gave you reason to doubt my sanity last month!

Sometimes, I ask myself why I like doing some of the [really goofy] things that I do. I think I have an answer for it—I enjoy contingency planning. I love “What if?” games. [Ask anyone who's ever had a long conversation with me about some project I'm working on ... I can contingency plan us a year into the future based on the minute possibility of one minor thing happening. It's a gift, y'all.] The thing is, this stuff puts me into an adrenaline rush, and that adrenaline fuels a lot of really fast, creative, non-linear thinking. And frankly … I really dig that.

You know, the old joke behind The Indiana Jones School of Management is, “Plan B? I’m still working on Plan A!” Some will read that exclamation and think, “Oh, he never plans anything.” They’d be wrong. It’s just that I’m forever tinkering with plans, evaluating contingencies, and playing “What if …?” It just excites me.

And, at the end of the day, the funny thing was … we had plenty of items to stick on those slides. When you look at all the little things that we do on a month-to-month basis, it all adds up. It may seem like a budgetary waste to have some people that are not affiliated with a project on a day-to-day basis, from a hierarchical management perspective, but in fast-paced organizations, you have to have a small cadre of flexible employees who can drop everything at a moment’s notice and focus a burst of energy on a small problem.

Again, I’m so blessed to be where I am.