Favorite Sayings of State Government Managers and the Interpretations

I recently resigned from my state position. Not wanting to waste any of the valuable lessons I learned there, I thought I would impart them to the rest of the world.

You need to be more flexible
This saying occurs when there is someone above you that feels they must put their 2 cents into the project whether or not they have the experience to do so. You will find there are a lot of leaders at the state that really do not serve any purpose beyond making changes, and most of the time those changes are counterproductive. You find that the useless leadership either does absolutely nothing because they feel secure in their positions, or they have perfected the technique of meddling into an art that gives the perception that they are adding value.

We do not say no here, because we believe in collaboration.
This one ties into needing to be more flexible. You will find a lot of projects that have no end at the state. The projects have become a ping pong match of butt kissing, everyone trying to outdo the next person by letting their superior make project altering decisions. You will also see this a lot when the leadership is in a political position that they are using to get their next job. They bend over backwards to please the leadership of their next company by compromising the integrity of their programs. The worst part of this saying is that it is usually used after a project has been completed. That is because the people who have the need to feel powerful will wait until everyone has sweated and bled over the project and think they have completed it, and then they will demand their changes be made. The more people they piss off, the bigger and better they feel.

We aren’t in the making money game; we are in the spending money game.
The bigger and more expensive anything you propose is, the better. Budgets only increase by the program spending more than they have budgeted. They don’t go before any committee, or board to get more money each year, they literally just have to overshoot their budget.

I think this will be a good opportunity for you.
This means I think this will be a great opportunity for you to give me something to pretend to manage so I can save my butt from being fired, even if it has nothing to do with your job description.

As soon as we get over this next hump things will get better.
That would be great, if there were actually humps to get over, instead of administrations needing to change before things might get better. The hands down opinion of every long term state worker I knew is this administration is the worse they have ever seen. That has lead to some of the poorest upper and mid level management to hit the state in years. Their decisions literally waste millions upon millions of dollars every year, and their employees are being forced to waste it.

You have to use this software because we bought the software. Your job is not to decide if you need it, your job is to figure out how to use it on your project.
This saying is attached to millions upon millions upon millions upon millions of wasted dollars.

A few other sayings often heard that need no explanation-

We need this done now so we will need to cut out the requirements, design, analysis, and architecture phases. We will also need to hold off on testing until we are in production.

Now that we are in production, let’s start gathering requirements.

Training and learning are not part of our job description.

We don’t use that technology because that would mean we have to learn it.

I know this is the wrong thing to do, but what choice do we have?

You aren’t being paid to think, you are being paid to work.

It doesn’t need to work, it just needs to be deployed. This date can’t slip.