Getting laid off: exit interview

I'm getting laid off at the end of the week, so I set up an exit interview. Here's how it went.

My first concern was that I'd done something wrong, but that wasn't the case. Of the six positions that were in the original contract, three were cut to free up funding for a shift to GS federal positions. And as turns out, the six positions we'd had were funded by an Unfinanced Request (UFR), which requires a year-by-year approval process.

I also found out that the whole "Deployment and Distribution Operations Center" contract was more of a "proof of concept" revival of an old idea, rather than a long-term arrangement. In the past, PACOM had a DDOC and staffed it internally, but with OIF/OEF siphoning away resources, such things were decentralized to the service components. The DDOC contract was meant as a first step toward re-centralizing those functions.

I had three recommendations to improve things for the future:

1. Contractors need training. The only skills contractors bring into the position are the ones that we left the military with. So if there's a function that needs to be accomplished, some measure of training is necessary.
   
   
2. We need a better statement of work. The original SOW was about developing products that would be used in a contingency scenario, but this was silly. CENTCOM already has products (reports, presentations, etc.) that have been tested in real-life situations. Why would we pay six contractors tens of thousands of dollars to imagine hypothetical situations in an attempt to re-invent the wheel, when we could get better products from CENTCOM for a fraction of the cost?
   
   
3. We need to know the big picture. What is the J4's mission? What are the boss's goals? A supervisor is better served by subordinates who know how to take proper initiative, rather than simply "look busy."

That last one was a point of contention for me. There were instances when we got better information from "open sources" than from official reports or reading the news, so I didn't understand the sensitivity to social media. Regardless, I'm pretty sure my next position will keep my busier than this one, so I'm not worried about it.