It’s what I’ve got

It’s What We’ve Got

My news junkie husband has been obsessed with the Healthcare.gov website, and what a debacle it has turned out to be. It’s not working very well. And the Internet has a lot of people who will talk about how a website should be created. Some are calling out in loud voices to TRASH THE WHOLE THING!!!!

I know some programmers. I asked them about it. The wisdom born of experience: Every new line of code written is another chance for a new, undiscovered problems to pop up. Starting brand new wouldn’t solve anything.

The devil you know…
You know.

This particular new item is fun for Chris to read to me because he knows it is an interest of mine.

“The contractors who worked on this site are saying that it was a game of chicken, to see who would call a halt first. This article says what they needed was a head person, not a contractor and not a government employee, to keep track of everything and give realistic reports and recommendations.”

“It’s failing because they didn’t have a project manager?”

My real life career experience, and my training, lets me picture it. With or without management, projects fail all the time. And much of the time, the project manager gets brought in not at the beginning of the project effort, but rather at the beginning of the recognition of failure.

Some ordinary person is called in to save the day. The resources are mostly used up; time, money and personnel are spinning into the end of their availability.

And so. Yes. Let’s not waste any time or resource or already expended effort.  We’re on a desert island with only the water supplies that crashed here with us.

I’ve written before about engagement. From this comfy armchair we can criticize. If we stepped up and tried it for ourselves, we’d immediately see it was harder than we thought.

We begin with mistakes. And I don’t know about you, but I end with mistakes too. This life is richly marbled with mistakes.

My friend Rocky has been blogging about something else. He’s a pastor in the Presbyterian Church I go to, and he’s really sad because a bunch of other Presbyterian churches in American have decided to separate from his church group.

This group is going to do it all over again and DO IT RIGHT.

This has been done before. And it will be done again. I can see that their new organization is taking with it all the seeds of it’s own destruction. We are all working with bugs in our code.

Revolution is messy. What have we got lying around to work with? What can we salvage from this wreck?

Wherever I go, there I am. So I had better start with me and what I know. And even if I know things aren’t right, I can start to work towards something better.

Everybody’s been doing it since forever

It takes a lot. I write this blog I don’t know if anyone Really cares.

Well, I do know that people care. I get people telling me they like it. But it is it’s pwn little island

I just read that Monty hall of let’s make a deal fame Did something very similar while he was looking for work.

He was first looking for work in New York City and still living in Montreal, He was trying really hard to get meetings with executives. He describes that he was getting nowhere. He was riding a one page Saying and mailing it to these people he called it Monties memo

Eventually one of the executive had lunch with him because they liked his writing.

He wanted a TV show. For me the writing is itself the outcome. I find this story encouraging