2.03: Make A SGM’s Day Better
In the Army, company command is notorious for being a time when you are abruptly woken up in the middle of the night. You get to be fully in charge of around a hundred other soldiers, with more autonomy than you’ve had in any job before, and this time with actual legal authority. The cost of those perks and autonomy is you get phone calls at two in the morning because one of your soldier’s allegedly did something illegal. It can be a long year of spoiled weekends for many commanders in the Army. Unless their company sergeant major is Ryan Begley.
Ryan Begley’s superpower was in talking to people. He was a hell of a Green Beret, who’d seen more than his share of hairy firefights, and had even survived two separate helicopter crashes. He was fit and could fight and shoot as well as any Green Beret in the company, but where he really excelled was sitting down with soldiers and talking to them.
The company had recently returned from Afghanistan and was having a rough transition back when I took command in the summer of 2014. Several of the soldiers were struggling with their recent trip, and one had killed himself. His death, and the scars from the deployment, continued to reverberate among the company, which was also going through the turmoil of new leadership on all but one of the six detachments.
There was often a queue of soldiers waiting outside Ryan’s office to talk to him. He patiently listened and coached the soldiers through their challenges, be they leadership or combat related. While giving our soldiers the tools they needed to keep moving forward, Ryan also got a solid pulse of the company. That second sense helped him head off a lot of problems before they became late night phone calls.
I don’t know of any way that data can speed up the time it takes to have a patient, meaningful, and heartfelt conversation. But I knew Ryan needed a lot more of it. So instead of trying to speed things up for him, I did what I could to buy him more time.
Every sergeant major in Special Forces has a giant dry erase board in their office. On it they track every soldier in the company, delicately balancing the six ODAs and the headquarters detachment to ensure they have the mix of skills they need. It starts with easy math, like ensuring there are two of every basic MOS per detachment.1 Two weapons sergeants, two engineers, two medics, and two commo sergeants (the intel sergeant, team warrant, team sergeant, and team leader round out the remaining 12-member detachment). But then you have to balance schools and skills: ranger tabs and jumpmasters, snipers and scuba divers, juniors and seniors. Then add in the time element, because every year another levy of is coming to pull NCO Green Berets back to the schoolhouse to train the next generation.
The boards get pretty complicated quickly, even more so when many guys adopt a sort of code to ensure their fellow company sergeants major can’t simply sneak over and read their neighbor’s board to poach the talent they need. In Ryan’s case, he spent about four hours a week updating his.
We actually already had almost all the data he needed for his board in a company Access file. New soldiers would input all their data into it when they signed in, much in the same style of the database I’d built for my infantry company eight years earlier. The two principal problems were there was no easy way to update the data, and there was no way to display it.
I had to brush up on my SharePoint after two years away in graduate school, but it came back quickly. What really made a difference was InfoPath. It seems Microsoft has had a love / hate relationship with InfoPath over the years, never fully supporting it, and repeatedly trying to kill it. Which is a shame because its superpower was it allowed a user to make a custom interface for their data. Instead of being restricted to SharePoint’s clunky Ux, InfoPath let you make your own.
With InfoPath, soldiers could quickly tab through a form that told them exactly what to input where. There was nothing stopping me from giving it a block that said, ‘Hey fuckface, put in your name here:’ You could dramatically cut back the number of clicks and kill the load times of page after page just to input a single piece of data on each. Being able to customize the interface with data was a killer app, and one almost none of the US Army procured software has.
Great data companies relentlessly refine their Ux to reduce every hurdle to getting better, faster, and more accurate data. The Army systems are mired in slow load times (or downtimes), too many clicks, too many screens, and too cumbersome processes. By leveraging InfoPath, we could customize the interface, and even create different views of the data for different levels. Most of the time team sergeants got by with little more than four columns of data on each of their soldiers, while Ryan got a report that replicated his entire white board with added features like calculating totals of skills and months on team.
Put another way, it’s the difference between Ikea and Lowes. Both exist for a reason, and sometimes Ikea is exactly what you need, all in one box. But we still need Lowes, because other times you have to fix things, and sometimes you just want something different. Ikea works because it can sell you a Kullen desk or a Hurdal dresser that you want, but Ikea doesn’t build houses. Army wide systems are too big to deploy without a digital Lowes that will help adjust and customize to the individual unit. And yet, on top of often lacking APIs, almost none of our tools support end user customization. The only tool I’ve ever had from the Army which let me do that was InfoPath.
But just as important as being able to customize the input was the ability to make the form print out on an 8.5” x 11” piece of paper. The bulk of the battalion was nowhere near ready to immerse itself in tables of data. But paper updates weren’t being input back into the system, which meant we had stale data. Designing a handy print out enabled the latest data from SharePoint database to be hand carried into meetings with no internet. It builds a bridge for the soldiers to a new world where you use data. The new system still meant team sergeants needed to do the work of learning a new process though, and the burden of keeping it accurate fell squarely on their shoulders.
I was able to ameliorate some of the burden by working with the team sergeants on the InfoPath interface, and it helped that when a soldier moved from one team to another, they no longer had to reinput all of the information into their tracker. He would simply drop off the view of one team and pop into another's, complete with everything we knew about him. Still, there was a cost to learning and about half of the team sergeants weren’t interested in paying it. That didn’t matter though, because, like the majors in the basement, the stakeholder in a Special Forces company isn’t the team sergeant. It is the sergeant major. Make a sergeant major’s day better, and you’ll get every team sergeant for free.
Ryan took back those four hours a week and put them to work talking to the soldiers in the company. In twelve months of command, I only got a single late night phone call. And that soldier was in Ryan’s office the next morning, talking to him, figuring out his own way forward. We even used some of that new found free time to drive three hours each way to observe one of the team’s training out in the mountains. I talked almost all six hours of the drive, and Ryan listened, asked questions, and mentored me just like he did every other soldier in our company.
Military Occupational Specialty, or your job in the Army, consisting of two or three numbers and one letter.