Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
on a binge. I mean, he was really strong about it. He had had his own experiences in the
private sector, which put him in opposition to this direction.
We had a lot of others who influenced him on just the costs. He explained that every time we
came over to brief him on CEAP, we sent somebody different over. So, he always saw a
different bunch of people, and they were always the technical folks, and that didn't have
much credibility with him. He felt the cost was just out of sight because he had seen an initial
estimate that was up in the
||content||
billion range, to do all of those things.
Now, the
||content||
billion estimate was not
||content||
billion. That was some early thing that had no
credibility with us either. When you boiled it down to the kind of things being considered, we
were talking 0 million. I'm not saying that's not large; what I'm saying is the
||content||
billion
was grossly incorrect.
So, anyway, we had a rather testy meeting in which he was adamant that, when the pilot test
was over, we'd better decide that was it. We weren't going to buy any more. I'm sitting there
at the meeting saying to myself, "Wait a minute. What's all this? We're embarked on the
thing."
I had thought it was all locked before I arrived. I thought we all had gone through it,
processed it, and come to grips with what we wanted to do before we went out to the
vendors. In fact, we had; but now we had different players. I responded to him that we did
base CEAP on requirements. We were not going to buy hardware first and figure out what to
do with it. We did know a lot of what we had to do. We did a lot of things in automation, and
our other machines were wearing out. We absolutely had to buy something soon to replace
our HarrisHoneywells because they were ancient, exhausted, and wearing out.
So, I promised him at that meeting that I would come back after the pilot test and lay out for
him the direction the Corps wanted to go and answer all of his questions. I said, "We're
going to show you how we based it on requirements. We'll show you how we fund it." He
was also interested in charge-backs to the districts because he felt they couldn't afford it and
we shouldn't put a system on them they couldn't afford.
So, I said, "We'll lay out the affordability situation in the districts. We'll make an economic
analysis that shows you what we're going to get. We'll answer every one of your questions,
and I'll bring it back to you."
He said, "Okay, well, you're going to have to do that before I approve it."
That took it from what I thought was going to be a nice source selection process and I would
be done with this issue, to one where I took the lead because somebody had to, to sort it out
over time. In fact, we did sort it out through a rather rigorous process that we set up.
There was nothing magic about it. It's, I guess, the way I've tried to approach things
throughout my whole career. That is, when you have an elephant that's too hard to swallow
in one gulp, you'd better break it down into bite-sized increments, attack each bite one at a
time, and make it happen.
458
Previous Page
