May 4, 2006
Dear Everyone:
Have I mentioned the CHDS yet? Probably not.
We first encountered CHDS near the beginning of last year, while we were still in the “Boring and Really Expensive Services” (BRES) operating company. We got many emails telling us, in effect, “CHDS is coming.”
Our supervisor was supposed to give us a presentation during a staff meeting. But he was busy, and out of town, so he just emailed the presentation to us and told us all to read it. Which I did, all the time wondering what “CHDS” was or what it meant. There was no one to ask, so I started making up possibilities.
Company Horribly Demeaning Servitude. That’s possible.
Company Heartfelt Downsizing Shared. Also possible.
Of course, you always assume when an acronym begins
with “C”, that it stands for “Company”.
Many years ago, the medical department decided that they wanted
to do some trend analysis.
Did more
So they gave the parameters and specifics to a programmer and said, “And we’ll call it the Company—“
“Oh, please!” the programmer said. “Everything in the company begins with ‘Company’. It’s in-house. Everyone knows it’s Company.”
And they agreed and told the programmer to give it a temporary name. So he named it the “Safety Health Information Tracking System”, a name that lasted about half a day until someone figured out what the acronym would be.
I finally decided that CHDS stood for “Cheese Head Deficiency Syndrome”. A Cheese Head is a guy who attends football games while wearing a fake wedge of cheese on his head. You have to admit there’s a true deficiency of these in the Bay Area.
Then the presentation got to about slide 27, which displayed a screen shot of the CHDS. It’s a website front-end to the “Career History and Development System”. We were supposed to go in and make sure that all of our educational and work experience were correctly entered.
Another part of CHDS concerns “competencies”. These are “skills / knowledge / behaviors” that could be part of your job. You were supposed to identify the “competencies” that you could do and rate how well you could do them and how much better you felt you should be able to do them.
Now that we’re in the Information Technology Company (ITC), they’ve taken CHDS to a much higher level. They have a “Competency Model” with seven subdivisions of the company. Each subdivision has a number of “roles”. Each role contains “skills, knowledge and behaviors”. Each skill and/or knowledge offers suggestions for how to find learning for how to get better at it (except for the Information Management part, naturally.)
All of this is so you can come up with a “Learning Action Plan” (LAP). I told my supervisor that my Learning Action Plan for this year was to study for and take the first five parts of the Certified Records Manager (CRM) Exam. He agreed that this probably would be my LAP, but that I still had to go through the whole process.
So I spent all last Friday going through the model, identifying the skills, knowledge and behaviors, going through CHDS (if you print it out, there’s 22 pages) and rating myself on those competencies I thought applied to me. Then I wrote out my LAP. It reads (more or less): “Study for and take the first five parts of the CRM Exam.”
I also printed and organized all the Roles, Skills / Knowledge, Behaviors and the CHDS competencies for ITC into a large binder. After my meeting with my supervisor, I’ll hand the binder over to the next person on his list. Because you can be sure none of the others in my group have had time to look at all this either.
And we continue to refer to CHDS as “Cheese Head” because it’s easier and faster to say.
Love, as always,
Pete
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