Welcome to my website. This is where I write about what interests me. Enjoy your visit!
All by Ralph Soule
My latest blog post, the first of several, is a collection of my snarky personal reflections from a decade of working on carrier maintenance improvement.
In my second post on the first meeting of Carrier Team One, I identify what I consider the most remarkable things about it. It is just as snarky as the last one so beware.
This post begins a candid series on how Carrier Team One improved carrier maintenance by confronting systemic dysfunction and stopping common leadership mistakes.
This post collects my reactions to a 2015 technical report analyzing gaps in Naval shipyard performance. I have way too much fun with Readiness Kill Chain and W=X=Y=Z.
Learning and Error Management (EM) strategies used on a CVN in Refueling Complex Overhaul. EM is a systematic effort to cultivate organizational resilience by learning faster.
Ship overhaul isn’t torture, but poor crew learning can make it feel that way. The “bad apples” approach to error constrains options and effective learning. This post introduces Error Management as a more effective way to learn from errors.
Learning rapidly to improve performance is a superpower in ship overhaul. Crew members will make errors because no one enters a prolonged maintenance period knowing what they need to know. The problem for the crew’s leaders isn’t what they don’t know about learning from error. It’s what they know that isn’t so.
Fifth installment of Undeniable Truths of Overhaul: Errors require corrective action, but don’t be stupid. Corrective actions are stupid when they ignore systemic sources of error, add additional controls, and are unreflective.
This is the fourth installment of Undeniable Truths of Overhaul. In it, I discuss two:
SY workers do care about the schedule
High performance is different in overhaul
This is the third installment of Undeniable Truths of warship overhaul. It is better to accept and act on them before the “piano of reality” drops on your head.
This is the explanation of Undeniable Truths of Overhaul 9-12: the crew needs to adapt quickly to the SY, senior leader visits disrupt work, the crew is the weakest link of overhaul, and supervision is the crew’s most limited resource.
This is the first of what will be several posts on the Undeniable Truths of ship overhaul. Ignore them if you will, but they won't ignore YOUl.
I close my series on Cost Estimating Theatre with a review of the Planning Fallacy, thoughts on whether accepting it is pragmatic or depressing, the reasonableness of expecting to “bend the cost curve,” and the implications for the U.S. Navy of predictably inaccurate estimates of cost and schedule for major projects.
The Planning Fallacy can be summed up with a paraphrase of Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your [acquisition plan]” (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5). This post describes the CBO’s cost estimating methodology.
The biggest resistance to a strategy to reduce the impact of the Planning Fallacy is likely to be denial of the selected reference class. This post describes my shield meltdown over references classes.
US weapons system are increasingly late to complete, and exceed projected costs. This post is an introduction to the Planning Fallacy.
The Navy’s schedule and cost estimates for new warships are “accuracy challenged.” This applies to almost all project estimates. This is the first post of a series that seeks to understand why.
This is another post on Navy ship maintenance realities. I restate the fundamentals of Navy ship maintenance (knowing, planning, doing, and testing) and do a deep dive on Class Maintenance Plans.
Navy ship depot maintenance is expensive. The only way to significantly lower repair costs is to do less of it. This isn’t good for long term ship material readiness or budgets. Neither is espousing rubbish about ship repair.
