Key Highlights
- Always establish a clear purpose and plan before purchasing or investing in new equipment or projects.
- Unnecessary or poorly planned investments can lead to wasted resources and unused assets, as seen with the abandoned video studio.
- Effective communication and detailed instructions are crucial when deploying new technology or resources in a team setting.
- Strategic planning can save organizations and individuals from costly mistakes and unproductive endeavors.
A few years ago, I was working remotely in a job that also included a lot of travel. On those days in my home office, I had to not only prepare and submit my many deliverables but also manage my travel and expenses. I was sitting at my laptop upstairs when I heard my wife call up:
“Hey, you have a bunch of packages on the front porch!”
Me: “Are you sure they aren’t just more of your Amazon deliveries?”
Her: “Nope, these are all for you and they appear to be from your employer.”
Me: “That’s odd. I didn’t get a notice saying they were sending me anything.”
I trotted down the stairs and opened the front door to behold the stoop filled with large boxes. I double checked the labels to ensure they were for me, and sure enough, they had come from my employer. I started to bring them into the house. But before I just dragged them upstairs to my tiny office area, I decided to find out what they were.
The big square box turned out to be a 36” monitor with a stand. I knew I hadn’t ordered this, so I left it boxed up until I could determine why it was mailed to me. The other boxes contained an expensive audio microphone and stand, a video camera, a large carrying case, a video light with stand and even a large silver umbrella used by photographers and videographers to direct ambient light.
I thought of my tiny office with its small desk and my MacBook Air. From years of business travel, I had learned the hard way to minimize my travel gear. I carried only a small backpack with my electronics and only checked a modest piece of luggage with my clothes. I couldn’t even imagine where I would put this huge monitor, let alone all the other items.
So, I called the home office. After three attempts to find the culprit, I finally spoke to the Marketing Audiovisual person who mailed out my gear.
“What the heck am I supposed to do with all this hardware?” I asked.
“The C-suite decided all you senior folks were going to start making videos from your home office and when you travel.”
“Videos about what?” was my obvious rejoinder.
“Don’t ask me,” he said, “my job was to determine what the fly-away kit needed, buy everything, and make sure you all got the entire set.”
I waited for the next team meeting to get more answers. My boss explained they were fly-away video recording sets, similar to those he used at his old job with a media company. We were going to use this equipment to make remote videos. Before asking the obvious “about what?” question, I took a different tack and asked how all this stuff worked.
“Well, you just hook it all up to your laptop and make a video,” was the stunningly naive reply.
“I guess it’s just plug-and-play then,” I responded, “what video capture and editing program are we using?”
“We’ll get detailed instructions out to everyone by the end of next week,” he promised.
“What is the subject of my first video and when is it due?” I replied.
“By the end of next week, we will let you know,” was the answer.
None of this passed my smell test, so I decided to leave everything boxed up and found a corner of the garage to store it all. At the end of the next week, no instructions arrived. I knew better than to poke the bear, so I didn’t even bring it up on our next team meeting. During the next meeting, however, it was announced that the organization was going to build out a video recording studio at the home office to the tune of $3.2 million. We would have the corporate capability to produce professional videos. That silly “about what?” question immediately popped into my head, but I knew I would just be labeled a troublemaker, so I just nodded along.
Now fast forward fourteen months. I am leaving the organization. During my out-brief, I promised to return all corporate equipment. Usually, it would have just been a laptop and maybe a docking station, but this time, I went out to the garage, loaded up my car, and shipped all the video gear back to headquarters. It cost them over $300 in shipping fees to get back the unused (and now outdated) equipment.
During those last fourteen months of employment, I never saw any of my colleagues produce a video. Not one. When some of us met at a site together, I noticed no one brought along their bulky video equipment.
Six months after I left the organization, they moved their headquarters to another state, and the expensive video studio was abandoned after producing precisely one professional video. The subject matter was a short clip with time-lapse photography about how they built the video studio. That was it.
The lesson here, of course, is about how critical it is to build out a plan long before you go buy the stuff you think you’ll need. This process works for both home and corporate life. A detailed, written plan may even disabuse you of your idea before you commit the money and resources to chase a fool’s errand. If you can’t answer the “about what?” question, you may want to reconsider. I only wish I had done so before I bought that boat.
About the Author
John McCumber
Cybersecurity Consultant
John McCumber is a cybersecurity executive providing targeted guidance for industry and government initiatives. He also develops and delivers consultative support for CIOs/CISOs in cybersecurity, data management, privacy and analytics. He is a retired US Air Force officer and former Cryptologic Fellow of the National Security Agency. During his military career, John served in the Defense Information Systems Agency and on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon as an Information Warfare Officer during the Persian Gulf War. John is a former Professorial Lecturer in Information Security at The George Washington University in Washington, DC and is currently a technical editor and columnist for Security Technology Executive magazine and the author of the textbook Assessing and Managing Security Risk in IT Systems: a Structured Methodology. He is now semi-retired and living the good life with his wife near Ocala, Florida.