Data Governance Matters

Consulting and Coat Hangers

Guest Host: Reese

One of my firmest convictions is that we are gifted with takeaways from almost every experience, we just need to be astute enough to pick them out. Here’s a recent one of mine…

It was over an hour before the meeting and about 10 minutes of driving to go when I pulled into the rest area. After the obligatory trip to the vending machine, I made a couple of phone calls then leaned back against the car for a few minutes of indulging in my favorite pastime, observing people.

There’s very little I enjoy more that listening to articulate, knowledgeable people talking about a field I’m not familiar with, and two men dressed in county maintenance uniforms discussing lift stations and flow patterns certainly fit that description. I was just turning to take one last sip of my drink before leaving when my elbow brushed the roof of my car and…

The cell phone hit the pavement, the back popped off, the battery skittered a few feet across the parking lot and down through a heavy grate. I walked over, and saw the battery about 3 feet below on the bottom of a culvert. The county employees walked over.

“Don’t worry; we’ll get it out for you. It’ll take few minutes, that grate weighs a couple of hundred pounds, we need to get the pry tool, a breaker bar with the right socket and put a cone out,” one said. “Sounds like a lot of trouble, let me try something first,” I replied.

I popped my trunk, pulled out a couple of wire coat hangers and a plastic bag (yes, I have that kind of a trunk,) straightened both hangers out, crimped the end of one of them around a corner of the bag, and squeezed it through the grate next to the battery on the bottom. I then took the other hanger, flipped the battery over into the bag and pulled it out.

It wasn’t until the ride home after my meeting when the takeaway from my experience hit me.

Those two men were intelligent, well versed in their field, and obviously had an established protocol to deal with the issue of getting into that culvert. However, it was a relatively labor intensive method, with my fresh perspective I was able to see a more efficient way to accomplish the task.

I’ve sometimes heard grumbling when a consultant is brought into an existing project. Bringing the newcomer ‘up to speed’ is sometimes regarded as just extra effort, after all, those involved have often been living and breathing the project for quite some time

But more often than you’d think, that newcomer just happens to have a couple of coat hangers in the trunk…