Misinterpreting Metrics: Lead Time Confusion

That metric may not be what you think. How often do I see that with lead times, particularly where Contracting gets the blame for how long it takes to get from need to solution delivery?

I got a parking ticket last week—in front of my house.

I don’t have a driveway, so I have no choice but to park on the street.  Earlier in the year, when the Return-to-Office mandates were resurfacing, this became a big deal for me to use my car to get to the office because the employees (and patrons) of restaurants a block away kept parking in front of my house and blocking me in for their full shifts.  That meant I would either miss going into the office or have to pay for a ride-share.  They could have parked in the free multi-story garages close to their destination, but nope: my quiet, oak-shaded street is infinitely more attractive—and extra steps.

Okay, so I’m creative.  I can find a way around things to make them work (plenty of training in DoD, ya know?). My neighbors are all friendly and … neighborly.  I figured out I could park in front of my absent neighbor’s house with a driveway that fits 4 cars, which is slightly less convenient, but it’s close enough to their driveway that I’m not blocked in and still at least 5 feet away so they can back out easily.  I checked the ordinances and they said I had to park at least 5 feet from a driveway so I didn’t block it.

Something changed.  Last week, a bunch of my neighbors’ cars on the street, as well as mine, had tickets.  Maybe I misread something that wasn’t enforced?  Maybe the Mandala Effect?  Anyway, the ordinance now says 10 feet.  I had parked 8 feet away.

My elderly neighbor across the street put up a tiny yellow flag on a wire to mark 10 feet from their own driveway so their adult kids would have a ticket-free space to park out front. I didn’t have a garage full of utility flags and didn’t want to lose my parking space to go buy one, so I broke out the kiddie chalk for the sidewalk and the big yellow tape measure like my dad used to use in construction.

Great!  Now I know exactly how close I can get to my neighbor’s driveway, not block them in, not get a ticket, and still have an easy way to leave home.  All good.

Two days later, I was driving back when a car swooped into my safe spot. Not exactly “swooped,” I guess. More like backed up, turned around, and three-pointed it into the space.  I did a double-take and parked way down the street.

The driver—a woman visiting the boutique shops (with free garages) a couple of blocks away, was waiting for me before I could get into my house, about 30 feet from her rear bumper.

“Why were you looking at me like that?” she demanded on the sidewalk in front of my house. She could have let it go and strolled on, gone long before I walked back to my yard.

I’d never seen her before in my life. She didn’t have to wait for me, but she was clearly having a bad day and needed to fight with someone she didn’t think would win.

“Because you can’t park there,” I told her, remembering my parking ticket. “You’re going to get–”

“This is a PUBLIC street, and I can park wherever I want!”

“Not really.  I usually park there, and this week I got a—”

“Oh, I don’t THINK so!  It doesn’t belong to YOU, and you can’t keep me from parking there!”

I’d been in a very nice mood until then. How hard did I want to argue with someone who wanted to be confrontational?  If she really wanted to win, I’d let her. Talking over me is an unpardonable sin.

“Um, okay?  But you’re gonna get a ticket there.  You have to be 10 feet from that driveway.”  Which was my neighbor’s driveway, not mine as she probably thought.

“Oh, I don’t THINK so,” she said again in a tone I will never forget.  Her cheeks sort of caught in her eyes.  Her upper lip curled toward the tip of her nose.

I half-expected her to pull out her phone and start recording me out of context for telling her to get off my lawn or off my street or something. This kind of thing happens a couple of times a year here, always with shoppers.  At least 90% of the people I talk to in front of my house are wonderful, and the ones who aren’t are usually selling something, not random shoppers.   And really, most shoppers—if they see me out front—will ask if they can park there and I say yes, and we chat a minute.

In this case, I shrugged and turned to go into my house, but she still wanted to fuss.

“Besides,” she continued.  “I’m more than 10 feet away.  See that mark on the curb?”

I couldn’t stop laughing as I walked into my house.  “That mark doesn’t mean what you think it does.”

If she heard me, I have no idea. She shook her head at me and marched off to the shops around the corner. Me, I knew the parking patrol was in the neighborhood about that time of day.

That mark didn’t measure what she thought it did, and she didn’t want to listen to my warnings.  I’d put the chalk mark very discreetly not at the 10-foot mark but at the point where I could no longer see over the hood of my car. As long as I could still see the mark, I was legal.

Until I learned the new space, that measurement was perfect for ME, in MY car, with the seat at a certain position.  Had I been in HER car, it wouldn’t have been accurate for parking–without a ticket.

Besides, she’d parked with her front tire even with the mark.  Definitely in violation and primed for a $30 ticket.

So sometimes we see something we think measures a particular thing, but because we haven’t asked the right questions, we misinterpret the measure.  The primary place where I see this happen in Acquisition and Contracting?

Lead times.  When does Contracting’s clock start?  Is it when they get a complete and USE-able requirements package with funding and all the documents they need to go advertise it?   Is it when they accept the first piece-part of an incomplete package?  Is it when they start working on it in advance of the package arriving because they know it’s coming and it’s urgent?  Is it when the funding document is put in their hand, 5 minutes before award, like the very first bunker buster, so the official lead time is ZERO even though I’d been working it for 2 weeks straight and it was a UCA?  Does it start when the solicitation goes out?  Does it start when the Program Manager first notifies the Contracting Officer that something’s coming?

I’ve seen it interpreted in every one of these ways over the years, regardless of the organization’s policy or regs or even the acronym’s words used to spell PALT.  The only time that I have NEVER seen Contracting mark the start of how they measure their lead time is before at least some part of it shows up in their job jar, either from a phone call or a single incomplete document they shouldn’t accept yet.

Example:  I used to award Phase I SBIRs when it was mandated that all selected Phase I’s MUST be awarded by June (sorry, can’t remember if it was the first or end of June). Contractors would sign the proposals in, to best of my memory, early January on the last possible day before it was due.  The evaluators and decision makers would wrap their rack-and-stack process in mid-February.  And then I wouldn’t see the proposal, the tech eval, the funding—anything—for 30 to 35 tentative contracts until late May or sometimes early June.  It’s always been delightful (truly) to have someone with considerable rank or grade call me and demand to know why a contract wasn’t awarded yet when it had been tentatively selected in February—and I get to explain that I haven’t seen it yet. (No worries—it would show up the next day, almost every time.)

What do most people who don’t know how lead time is measured think is the chalk mark at the beginning of a long lead time?  Things that happen under someone else’s control, often a year or more before the Contracting Officer hears about it for the first time. So it’s fair to ask how long Contracting has had a package to award, but it’s also fair to ask how long they’ve had a USE-able package with which to award.  Bonus points—and no parking tickets—if you ask how long between the requirement (need) and the time that Contracting could actually do something to buy a solution.