My biggest output to date is my HR guide, in all its forms, going back to 2004 or so. I’m happy people like it, the price doesn’t hurt ($0, downloadable PDF with no friction to access), and there is limited competition in a narrow niche. But I have plans for other guides, and to that end, I’ve been working on some cover pages for the books to serve as inspiration. My list of planned books is growing, though, and I have decided to start working on some of them before I retire instead of waiting.

HR-related books

First and foremost, I’ll update the HR Guide to competitions, aka Be the Duck. It’s relatively given that I’ll update it, and I’ll probably do three more significant updates before I call it quits when I retire.

Secondly, I am doing one called Be the Swan, which is more about managing your career.

Thirdly, I’ll do one called Be the SheepDog about being a manager with some elements about becoming an EX potentially.

And finally, one about “when things go wrong” and you have to deal with conflict, grievances, staffing complaints, etc. I’m not entirely sure what that one will look like. I’ve considered a few formats, but none particularly resonate with me yet. I’m worried one path will be way too dry for me to keep writing about when the “passion” turns to “slog”.

On the other hand, I have all the covers.

Government-related texts

I have plans for a bunch of government-related texts. I’m not entirely sure the sequence for them yet, to be honest. Some of them look a lot like my day job at ESDC, and even overlap with some of the types of files that I’ve worked on over the years.

Soooo, under the heading of boring to everyone else, there’s one about performance measurement within the Government of Canada aka GoC (and maybe the provinces and territories too, haven’t decided yet). And I haven’t entirely decided if this is mainly about government (i.e., part of my series of guides about government) or primarily about performance (i.e., part of my series about performance). It’s a narrow niche, I know, and most people wouldn’t care. But there’s something that has bothered me for a long time, a little itch, and I just have to scratch it.

Within the government, if you seek funding for a new program, the first thing you have to do is prepare policy documents about what the program would do, who it would help, how it would operate, etc. But not too far past the policy process, the administrative machinery of government kicks in and asks for more details about not only what it would do but also how you will know if it is actually doing it. What are the performance indicators you are going to have?

Within the GoC, there are about 600 programs who have a program budget more than $5M and all of them have to have a full performance measurement document (originally they were called PM strategies, then they morphed into framework documents called Performance Information Profiles). Another 300 programs have a budget betweeen $1M and $5M or so, and have varying levels of performance documentation and frameworks. I know it sounds crazy, but I can consume these like snack cakes. I literally could review all 900 of them and come up with “best practices” or standard approaches depending on the type of instrument being used (there are between 10-15 options, depending on how you classify them). So, for example, there are probably 50-60 “programs” that are awareness-based, less than $5M. Because they are at multiple departments across all of government, there isn’t anyone looking at all of them. Even Treasury Board Secretariat, which reviews them all, doesn’t have time or a structure that lets them review all in bulk.

And more pointedly? TBS doesn’t have a standard model to give to departments developing new programs of whatever instrument they’re using. They almost all start from scratch, although that’s a bit misleading; very few programs are truly operating in a policy space that doesn’t have SOME program already running in it to model itself after. Or they borrow from other countries’ approaches, etc.

I used to coordinate these for a large branch, and it amazed and annoyed me how many people had to struggle for months to create these documents so others could understand what the program was doing. Huge wastes of time trodding the same ground that other programs already trod for another program that was similar in structure, maybe just a different sector. Don’t even get me started on the huge waste of money spent to hire expert consultants to come in and do the work for them. I personally believe that if you started with the right instrument, and were handed a “best practices” template of all the other programs using a similar instrument, you could do 95% of your PM approach in about two hours. And create better reporting to Canadians. I know, I know, I’m both a heretic and a nerd.

But what if ONE person read all 900 PIPs? In batches by instrument type. To look for commonalities. Government employees don’t have time to do that kind of review. Many wouldn’t even see it as useful. Academics, maybe, but not managers or even those in the program trenches. They would see it like all the other changes to PM over the years — PM strategies, deliverology, PIPs, PAAs, DRFs. Just acronyms all doing something slightly different, and adding paperwork to their jobs. Add in all the recent developments for departments in Chief Data Officer positions, the drive to be data-driven when they haven’t even figured out what they should be doing to know what data they need to do it better, and it looks like overhead.

Except my goal is the opposite of overhead. I’m an odd bird for PM indicators. People I worked with were frequently frustrated or surprised by my approach. Those who were in the normal PM world wanted MORE MORE MORE indicators, those who were in programs wanted DEEPER and SIMPLER, while I always wanted BETTER and FEWER. I’ve had long painful discussions where people told me they needed to know if the equivalent of blonde-haired people with green eyes and a limp got better results than dark-haired people with brown eyes and a bounce in their step. Except the program had nothing to do with hair colour, eye colour or their mobility, generally (although some would argue there COULD be), but more importantly, we had NO POLICY LEVERS that would or could do anything about it even if we DID see some sort of anomalous outcome differential.

I know, I know, I’m already writing the damn thing and I haven’t even started. 🙂 That’s why I’m planning a book. I haven’t quite figured out if I’ll file Access to Information requests to get all the info, or I’ll try ot sweet-talk TBS into letting me have them more easily. Either way works.

The second idea for a book is a direct outcome of some work I did for ESDC on the Horizontal Review of Skills Programming. I was never happy with 2 or 3 things that we didn’t or couldn’t do as part of it. Initially, I wanted a clear framework upfront of what we thought “skills programming” in Canada meant. Who was doing what. A map, maybe, or some sort of inventory. So we could say, “of all the programming out there, this is what we consider relevant and who we think are the main actors”. Then, from there, we could decide which programs were “skills” and if it should be in or out of scope.

But there was a problem. I work for the federal government. And I’m part of a large hierarchy, and we (ESDC) weren’t even in charge of scoping the review. TBS was. So, there were three or four scoping choices made that were perfectly logical and defensible, and even potentially where there were no other feasible approaches without violating FPT relations and potentially the constitutional division of powers. Heck, some days, we couldn’t even agree if it was the HRSP or the Horizontal Skills Review, what the exact goal was, etc, but we did it. However, in my future retired life, could I redo that project myself? I could. I can. I will. I can make different decisions on scoping. I don’t know how large of a scope I will have, but it will be bigger than the one I had previously. I think in frameworks and my framework will start larger. Unfortunately, I won’t have the power of TBS to compel people’s input, so I’ll have to rely heavily on public information, but it’s doable. Probably within about 6m.

A third idea I have is heavily tied to the first. Maybe it’s not a separate book, maybe just part of the original review idea, but that “framework” could itself be a whole separate book. What are “skills” in terms of the labour market in Canada? And does the “review” above focus more on the government programs or what’s available? Is it descriptive, normative, analytical? Heck, I could probably do separate books on each and every province or territory, what it looks like, what do the numbers from Statistics Canada say. I could even publish them as a series of texts that I’d update every year with an overview of each PT. Or, like I said, is this just a different version of the review, with chapters on each PT that are separate from the review? Is description enough? In short, I don’t know. I’ll know when I look at the first province. But because all of this overlaps with my day job, I won’t be able to publish anything probably until at least August 2028, a year after I retire. The “cooling off” period, so to speak.

My fourth idea is a whopper. If, just for kicks, I wanted to imagine a full-on rethink of the Canadian government, how exactly would I go about doing that? On an infrequent but regularized basis, the government has done reviews of all programs and departments to make sure it’s doing what it should. Often this happens after a change of government. There was a large-scale program review back in the early ’90s, another Strategic Review in 2007-2011 or so, more reviews and cuts in 2012-13 (for the Deficit Reduction Action Plan), and more recent austerity reviews. If there is a change in government, most pundits think we’ll likely go through another review. So, as a public servant with a view towards structures and frameworks and performance, oh my, could I do a review of my own where I’d say which programs I would cut, how many Ministries do I think is the right number, etc.? If I was Prime Minister, what would I do if I ran the zoo?

My fifth guide is kind of about government, but goes in a very different direction to focus on municipal law and the enforcement of speed limits with photo radar. I have serious concerns about how municipal governments wield their power for traffic stuff, both parking and speeding actually, which are weird things to worry about, I admit. Except it isn’t just about being a government nerd. It’s about more fundamental aspects of how the state interacts with citizens, and we accept certain things from municipalities that aren’t being done according to Hoyle. In fact, the law seems almost black and white AGAINST some of the administrative approaches, yet they persist and expand. Some of the writing is simply to better understand it myself but perhaps also to provoke some reaction.

Finally, or at least for now, my last idea for a government-related book is to write almost an introduction to Canadian public administration. Most of the textbooks that I see for public administration are more about public policy than public administration. I read Michael Wernick’s guide to running government (aimed at Cabinet Ministers, DMs, etc.) and a good portion was just about policy interactions, very little about the administrative machinery. I have wondered if I could find a voice based on 30y of public administration experience. I confess I had the same problems in university when doing my public admin degree — most courses and programs focused on the policy side, with political economy running rampant. Interesting enough, but it missed out on about 60-70% of the day-to-day work of a public servant. The part of the iceberg below the water line, if you want a metaphor.

Performance guides

I mentioned the one big one above, tied to government, where I would review all of the performance measurement materials of GoC programs. A big but manageable endeavour. If it wasn’t for the next two books, I’d probably just count this one as part of my “guides to government” series instead of creating a separate series on performance.

However, in addition to doing performance measurement for the government, I have spent a lot of time in the last 20 years looking at personal goal-setting, options, ways of thinking about things. I’ve even blogged about parts of it. But it makes me wonder if there’s something else I could do about personal goal-setting, more of a self-help guide than me sharing my experiences. I don’t know what to call the “category”, but for now, I’m counting it as performance. I know there’s something “there”, I just don’t have my voice or angle for it yet. It will come in time.

Thirdly, when I was doing my undergraduate, I considered going on to an MA in Library Science, rather than law or public admin. I was working at the university library for my four years, and it made me want to perhaps continue with the issues around me. I went in a different direction, but I still feel a strong resonance with libraries. When you add in government administration, it’s not surprising that I find public city libraries fascinating in operations.

Yet what do I find interesting about performance? If you look at a report or website of a public library, it will basically describe the library as a community resource centre. Meeting spaces, computer services for jobs and genealogy, books of course, and a ton of other things. But if there is a hint of cutting, immediately the story changes — “You can’t cut books!”. Because books resonate. But I don’t like that approach, and I think it fails more often than not.

They may not close a library, but they’ll shutter branches and reduce budgets. Why? Because the things that the library says it is good for do not show up in the stats. They cannot tell a solid performance story for it. Or perhaps it is more appropriate to say they don’t tell a compelling performance story. And the decision-makers who make the funding decisions don’t get good data or information to help them tell whether something is performing well or not. I don’t have the answers; again, it’s more of an itch to scratch.

Could I do a review and come up with a good PM storyline for public libraries? Would it be different than academic libraries, school libraries, historical libraries, national libraries? How many functions does a public library perform? Are they EQUAL in importance? If you cut a function, could you save a branch? I’ve got some ideas to look into, and I could even see it turning into a small consulting business that I might be willing to consider doing, despite the other options being far more lucrative. Just enough paid work to offset expenses. And if nothing else? I get to spend time talking to people about libraries. 🙂

Astronomy materials

Something weird happened to me concerning astronomy books. I’ve acquired several of them, read many of them, skimmed relevant sections of others; in the end, I found gaps in my desire for knowledge. I don’t really understand why, to be honest. I have some very basic questions that nobody else seems to think are worth mentioning or a worthy approach to explaining things.

First, I hate how people advise others on what scopes to buy. I’ve blogged about this before; it just makes no sense to me. They answer complicated questions with facile answers and are surprised when they see people getting out of the hobby after becoming frustrated. Well, of course, they were frustrated — they bought the wrong tool! Because we told them the wrong information!

Second, I have some expertise in a couple of small niche areas of astronomy, and well, nobody else is sharing that info.

Third, I have a desire to explain 2-3 things in a very specific way to see if I can do it and if it will help others. I think it will, but hard to say for sure.

Sooooo, not unlike the situation that led to my HR guide, I started thinking about creating some sort of resource. And it morphed into me writing an astronomy book. Or a series of astronomy guides. Or 20 brochures or something.

I didn’t know if I would ever get to it, it seemed kind of daunting too, with a whole bunch of elements not making sense unless I also wrote a version of some other topics that would link my desired topics together. I started thinking it was one book, with about 11 large chapters, and maybe about 2 years of writing before I would have anything worth sharing. Except, with some other stuff I’m working on, I realized that I can write some of the pieces in stages and just share them on my website as soon as they are ready.

Which I’ve already started doing (the writing, I mean). It’s changed my appetite for a lot of topics, to be honest. I feel like I can work on different things between research and writing, editing and publishing, etc., without having to do BOOK 1 all the way through and potentially running out of steam. I suspect, although I’m not sure yet, that I’m probably looking more at 4-5 shorter astronomy books with 2-3 chapters in each.

I already have the cover for the first one, and I’m really happy with the design. So far, so good.

Wrapping up

Let’s see where that leaves me for now:

1. HR-related books: 1 mostly done, 3 more to go;
2. Government: 6 books;
3. Performance: 3 books;
4. Astronomy: 4-5 books;

So, yeah, 18 or so in total that I am starting to work on, figuring out basic structures and gathering research. I have another topic that I haven’t quite figured out yet. I think it’s going to be called “crafting”, but not entirely sure. It COULD be “hobbies”, I suppose. That’s probably another 4-5, but I’m not counting those yet.

On the fiction front, I have a basic outline for almost the same number of fantasy and mystery titles. Those will wait until I am retired though, I find it too hard to switch back and forth to do non-fiction and fiction at the same time. Different muscles, perhaps.

Umm, let’s see, that means I have most of 1 out of 36 near done, which is not an excellent progress report. But I have figured out what I want, at least. Onward!