February and March really threw me for a loop. I’m not accustomed to taking back blogs or not blogging about a big project. But, I’m ready to blog for April before this month is gone too. Time flies while you’re having fun!
My big event this month was the annual gathering of the AMSETers. We met in the Land of the Megawatts aka. Santa Clarita, California.
(Check out those 500 kV towers! You can feel the megawatts.)
We had a very good attendance for a unit meeting. All but four permanent team members were present. AMSET added two new permanent memebers since the last team meeting, one of which is me, and our new to the team Wildlife Biologist detailer made the meeting as well. Although Jo Ann, our Enterprise Team Leader, did not attend because she is still on sabbatical, she did conference call in for a brief update on how she is doing.
“I love working with adults!” I said to myself more than once during our meeting.
We had an agenda and we moved through it like we wanted to get something done. Like grown-up adults.
All in only one day we discussed:
The roles of the team leader and team members,
The possiblity of changing our name to Adaptive Management Services, instead of AMSET,
Changing or improving the appearance of our logo,
Defining or re-defining our team mission,
Assessing and defining our workload (need more work or overtaxed already?)
Reviewing and changing our organization charts,
Reviewing the discussing how we could improve our marketing,
Discussing what will our future look like?
And we took a group photo. Say “Cheese” for the camera!
AMSET is really three self directed teams: the Science Section, the Business Section and I’m in the Planning Section.
The Science Section people all like to run out in front of fires, throw equipment into plots and watch the flames. Then after everything is all charred and ashy, they gather up their data and compare the predicted fire behavior to the actual. Real fire data.
The Business Section does a lot of stuff no one likes to do, and hopes to never have to do. I’m glad they’re around because they help all of us in the Forest Service get resource management work done. They have the guts to face things like purchasing, hiring, and dealing with the dreaded ASC (Albuquerque Service Center.)
The Planning Section was originally set up as “cash cows” for the Science Section. It seems that everyone hates doing NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) analysis and are willing to pay big bucks to get it done – by someone else! That’s us, the mercenary, work for pay: “Caring-for-the-Land-and-I’ll-Get-Your-Project-Done-for-a-Fee Planners.” The sick part is we really like our jobs. Well, maybe not exactly … at least I really like project planning.
The best part was meeting everyone on my Enterprise Team.
We didn’t sit and talk about when we would begin to talk about our organization. We didn’t study our workloads and pontificate on possible trends and analyze staffing alternatives until the cows came home. We didn’t decide to put off to tomorrow what we knew we wanted to do today. We didn’t whine about declining budgets and downsizing. We didn’t complain about when to turn in reports and targets. We didn’t dance around last year’s deficit and wring our hands over cries of cutting the budget.
We were honest and direct, and said what we wanted then moved on to the next item. The first ground rule up front was that no one was to have hurt feelings about what was said at the meeting.
Ah, how refreshing! Our organizational planning is done for now. I’m off to work my billable hours. There are projects to be planned!