https://dilbert.com/strip/2009-10-24
Deciding who is important is interesting.
Senior management wants to see a plan. Middle manager needs to decide who is important. If Middle Manager says only 8 of 20 are critical, what does that say about the other 12? The only answer that most managers offer is ‘all my employees are critical to the enterprise’.
I’m assuming that many or most readers have been a part of some sort of pandemic planning. In our EDU system, the plan isn’t interesting because of the criticality of anything that we do. In a major pandemic, deadlines can be extended, semester start and end dates can be changed, faculty can adapt. It’s interesting because of what our facilities can do. In the rural towns served by many of our colleges, the campus is the best-connected building in town. In many cases, our college serves as the local or regional backbone connection point for T1’s from other state agencies, some of which have critical public health, safety or law enforcement roles. I suspect some of those agencies are more important than an exam, lecture or quiz. It’s possible that for us, the critical resources in a pandemic might not have anything to do with education. HVAC, power, and routers might be the top priority.
Then there’s payroll. You’ve got to keep that going no matter what. Sick employees don’t have the energy to mess with bounced checks and overdrawn accounts.
