The user group that matters most to my current organization works in a sprawling, 100,000+ ft² complex on the outskirts of Doha, Qatar. They are responsible for some very important (and very difficult to describe work), the results of which are constantly at risk for putting the united states military on the evening news, for really good reasons, or really bad ones.

Sometimes it's faster than you think.

I have chosen to spend month+ rotations holed up in that building, facilitating two of the largest technological shifts that my organization has accomplished.

In 2020, I helped re-scope and accelerate a migration of all our production software from the organization's own locally-hosted cloud service to an enterprise solution developed by my organization. When I was sent out for four weeks, I was told it would be a six month process and all I could hope to do was help set the stage for all the work to come.

Upon arrival, I was told by the operators already on the ground that the majority of the work was completed and most of the remaining timeline was bureaucracy, not technological blockers. Six weeks later, my replacements used the groundwork that my partner and I had laid to complete the move 4.5 months ahead of schedule.

Real context comes from serving in the trenches.

When I came back in 2021 our integrated product suite had reached its first major milestone and our teams were ready to field a major upgrade and capability expansion to our production software--it would involve changing some user process flows, teaching a new set of interfaces, and supporting hundreds of users to required the system to perform at its best.

My peer had set the stage by working through a set of intense, high pressure testing efforts with users to identify and stamp out the last major bugs, and I arrived for the final day of briefings and then stayed in place to act as one member of the 3-person liaison team that would make sure the upgrade went smoothly while he returned to the states to oversea the finishing touches on the software's feature development.

I came back with a broader knowledge of our software as an operations suite than almost anyone else within the organization, knowledge that would be key to my ability to lead teams and help guide their decision making as we supported the software's new capability.

That software would go on to support the 2021 Noncombatant Evacuation a couple of months later, one of the largest coordinated airlift operations in history.

You need to have the experience of being the person downrange saying "yes, we can" when the "you can't" phone call comes.

A former boss of mine recently shared this brilliant memo.

Going to the front keeps you from losing perspective. There's no faster way to lose the trust of the people you lead than to tell them something that they are doing every day is impossible.