2.04: ‘I’m From the Future’
Steve introduced himself to me as a time traveler.1 We were holding our annual group-wide training meeting in the fall of 2015, and I had just moved into a new XO job up at the battalion headquarters. Steve was a sergeant major who had just come from another unit much further along down the road of embracing data than ours.
He took the stage in front of hundreds of gathered field grade officers and senior NCOs and proceeded to detail all the backward processes we had. Our group had slipped back to printing out packets for everything and tracking them by logging them on paper in oversized green notebooks. The digital staffing system had withered away during my two-year sabbatical, though the MPG was still plugging along. On stage, Steve laid out how slow and inefficient our processes were, and how prone they were to lost packets and redundant wait times. Then he proposed it didn’t have to be that way.
‘I’m from the future,’ Steve boasted to a very skeptical crowd. ‘Except the future is 2007’. There probably weren’t many people in the crowd who got the joke: we were working off SharePoint 2007 at the time. Still his point was made. Our organization wasn’t even keeping up with the past. Steve went on to paint a picture of how things could be. Jump logs filled out just by scanning IDs like groceries at the store. Awards that were quickly processed and never again lost. Support requests that could be tracked without even leaving your team room.
Steve won a few converts that day, and I made a point to catch him after his presentation, seeing an ally who might help revive the digital staffing tool built before I’d left for school. He was willing to help me learn what he already knew, and was a great source for even more ways we could leverage data in the unit. We hit it off and became quick friends.
He was not friends with our battalion CSM Larry though.2 I never dug into why. Steve was fluent in data, and so he didn’t spend time making it printable. To him, data was best when it was alive, and paper was always dead. He wasn’t wrong, but it also meant there wasn’t a bridge for the data illiterate. I don’t think it was Steve’s focus on data that caused the CSM to not like him, but mostly because their personalities rubbed each other the wrong way. However, it had the same effect. The CSM didn’t like Steve, and so he also didn’t like Steve’s ideas about how to use data. Which meant he didn’t really want to hear anything about data at all. Until the morning the SWC Levy brief got abruptly moved three hours early.
The SWC Levy is a huge event every year.3 All the battalion CSMs haggle and negotiate over who to send as they try to satisfy two competing goals: the school house needs solid leaders to train the next generation and the line battalions need great NCOs to deploy. The only way to be prepared for the Levy is to have a firm grip on your battalion’s manning.
Larry was clearly in a mood as he burst into the headquarters around 0700 that day. He fumed about the time change as he aggressively tried to organize his notes. Given we were three hours behind USASOC headquarters’ eastern standard time, I presumed someone had failed to convert the time to local, a fairly common occurrence out in Joint Base Lewis McChord. There wasn’t enough time for Larry to ping the company sergeants major for their manning, so he’d have to go into the meeting with whatever he could carry.
I jogged back to my office and printed the latest pull from our homegrown SharePoint list. The three line companies had the same structure, so adapting the system I built for Ryan to the other two barely took an afternoon of work with Steve’s help. I printed out the three pages and gave them to Larry with the caveat that I figured they were only about 90% accurate. This was because Larry’s distaste for data initiatives had permeated down the chain, and there was more than one team sergeant who had ignored my requests to update their data. Larry took the papers without a glance and set off for the group headquarters clearly in a pessimistic mood.
He came back several hours later, but this time he was probably the happiest I’d ever seen him. Larry was normally stridently stoic, but now he was smiling, with a bounce in his step as he strode back down the hallway. When I asked him how it went, he just replied, ‘No one else had their manning’. He spread the three pages I’d given him onto his table and stared at them for a bit. Then he asked me why they were only 90% accurate. By the end of the day, they were 99% up to date.
Steve and I hadn’t set out to help Larry beat out his fellow CSMs at the SWC Levy when we built the battalion PERSTAT4. Instead, I was actually just trying to solve a different math problem. One that would help our battalion getting hundreds of thousands of more dollars to train with.
Not his actual name. I’ve changed two names in this post. I don’t want to give the impression either weren’t great sergeants major. They were excellent NCOs who worked hard to take care of their soldiers. But they did not work well together so I’ve changed their names so neither comes off in a negative light.
Also not his name. Command Sergeants Major are the senior NCO in a unit and are selected by a centralized board just like the commander’s they advise.
The US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (USAJFKSWCS) is where all Army SF is trained. It also has the most unpronounceable acronym in the Army, which is why we just call is SWC for short.
PERsonnel STATus, or a list of where everyone in a unit is at any given moment.