Update on my job

No, I don’t know yet if I’m getting another promotion or not. I’m not sure I even want it. Although I am anxiously awaiting to see who my new boss will be.

My job has been getting harder and more frustrating for several reasons. One is vacancies and changes in my management chain. There is literally not a single person in my management chain who was there when I started this job a year and a half ago. There are approximately 6 levels of management between me and the Governor, and every single one of those positions is either vacant or is staffed by someone who has come in new to their position within the past year. We’re in the middle of 100% management change in the span of just a few months.

I had been implementing a lot of process improvements, but my ability to get those ongoing improvements through my management approval process has plummeted during these upheavals. Until a few more management positions are filled, I really don’t have a good sense of what it’s going to be like going forward. I’m fairly optimistic that things will slowly improve, because I think we just got a good new Governor in who appears to be hiring good people under her. But a lot will depend on who my new immediate manager will be.

A couple of really big values I have in my job is that I’m able to get something useful done, and that I have management who appreciates and supports my efforts. When I started a little over a year ago, I was appalled at the mess I had inherited, but at least I was being given some leeway to make a bunch of improvements.

I’m a somewhat entrepreneurial person and I am fairly driven to improve things. I’m not the sort of person who will quietly sit and do the same thing day in and day out when things are being done badly and processes are broken. I’ve made a lot of improvements but I still have a lot more to make. Now is not the time to grind to a bureaucratic halt due to management staffing issues.

I don’t want to put on a public blog details about how bad it really is, but another big problem is that we are chronically badly understaffed. I’m doing what I can to streamline processes so we can be more efficient with the limited resources we have.

But on top of that, there is a huge oil and gas boom going on in New Mexico right now. Production increased 30% last year. My department primarily regulates the oil and gas industry because they are the largest air polluters. It’s pretty obvious that if there’s a huge oil boom going on, that we’re going fall behind in our regulatory duties unless we can increase our productivity somehow.

Especially since we were already badly understaffed before this boom. I’m being told there are no plans for any additional positions. We couldn’t even get half of our work done before. How are we going to even begin to keep up with an oil boom going on?