Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

In government acquisition, the government employees make the decisions about projects. They often have to decide whether to continue or cancel a troubled project. The decision they often render is odd.

I worked in government acquisition circles for over 25 years. One of the principle tenets of that field is:

Contractor employees  make money

but

Government employees make decisions

In my experience, the above is true. It is one of the few things that keep people in government employment.

The government employee tells the contractor employee what to do.

There are many projects undertaken by the government-contractor partnership that go badly. There are many reasons for this including: the technology isn’t ready, the funding is off cycle, the economy places killer constraints. The list goes on and on and on.

In these bad situations, the government employees decide:

continue the project or cancel it.

An odd, but frequent, decision I saw government employees issue is:

Continue the project

and

Feel bad.

This occurs when people want to cancel a project, but cannot justify canceling it. The project should have been cancelled 6 or 12 months earlier. The decision makers, however, were not paying attention. Now they pay attention only to learn of the true and sad state of the project. They also learn that they have spent too much money to quit now. They are, as the cliche goes, beyond the point of return.

Therefore, they keep the project going. And they feel bad.

Feelings, however, don’t stop here. They make it well known that they expect everyone still working on the project to feel bad, really bad, really very bad every day.

Funny, they never seem to learn that they only control how they feel. They don’t realize that all the other people associated with the project are adults, and adults choose their own feelings.

The futility doesn’t stop there. Once the decision-makers notice that other adults don’t feel they way they “are supposed to feel,” the decision makers become angry and vindictive.

Yes, these are adults, at least that is what their birth certificates state.