Good morning everyone, I and Matt hope you are all doing well today. Today we would like to discuss part 2 of our plans for the coming term if elected. For lack of a better term at present we are calling this an ‘audit of ships/fleet’ structure and areas in the club. This partly as I discussed in the streamlining the cabinet HQ post plays into that.

So first part, how will ship/fleet audits work? I’m sure as everyone reads this they are thinking it means I’ll be cutting ships again. Well as I’ve said last term, decommissioning ships should only be the final step when all other avenues are taken to save said area that is highlighted has having major problems. It also probably conjures up ideas that I am particularly looking at one ship or another or a fleet.

Once more the idea in this plan is to work with all of the FComm/AFComms once setup to evaluate all the ships in their fleets by not only looking at the ship’s health over the past 3-4 months prior to look for patterns of issues, but also communicate with the CO/XOs of all the ships to get their feedback on what they feel are issues on their ships. This evaluation will be judged per the current standards of FCOMM in part, but also take into account such factors as like did the CO/XOs communicate with the fleet staff of issues, what if any issues did the staff do to help, did the CO/XOs keep their ship profiles up to date on their admin side? Are they managing awol/loas with emails to said players? What are they doing on their own to recruit openings, etc.

In short while the standards in FCOMM will be one measure we will also be judging on what CO/XOs are doing to make up problems beyond their control that could be defined per FCOMM as a ‘unhealthy’ ship. For example if say a ship has been trying to fill a core DH spot for 3-4+ months and actively been trying to recruit, trying to encourage JOs that could fill the spot appropriately to move up and getting no where, having their ship profile page updated, etc. Then that will be less of a problem then say if the CO/XOs are not doing such things in that example.

We will also be looking at the command teams of ships to look for consistency of managing their ships awols/loas/open positions and such. That they’re aware of say the ship profile setting on their admin page, that they are regularly communicating issues with the fleet team, basically if we find areas we feel are lacking or a co/xo communicates they are unclear of how to do something we will note this and take measures to clear up any issues to the best of our abilities.

At the end of this auditing we will then look at any ships/areas that we feel are simply beyond saving even if say we gutted the command team and DHs and rebuilt the ship from scratch, (aka like some places had due to lack of interest in the areas idea). Once any of those such decisions are made and any personnel reassignments are handled we will evaluate whether we need to decommission a fleet and shuffle those remaining ships to the others. Again this ties into the options for streamlining the cabinet, and balancing whether its better to have few ships for fcomm/afcomms to manage but have 8 people to fill those spots or have more ships in a fleet for the fcomm/afcomms to manage but only need 6 people to fill said spots.

Again this would be involved with a Command discussion at such needed times. To highlight in our findings factors which are common that could be addressed. In this case this ties into our plans to engage the club membership as a whole (part 3 from our introductions), and tie into identifying and writing up common guides for training of how to do something for a ship or the club (part 4 of our introductions). In this way we have a organized list of common things to bring consistency to doing important roles in STF, that are put in a place to read that future members looking to move up have a better idea of what they should expect before applying or considering such roles. We also learn from mistakes or pitfalls that past people have made that we can learn from and grow as a community.

I hope this second part of our plan this coming term if elected is not taken as a doom/gloom as it may sound but as an opportunity to learn and grow as a community as a whole.

Robert Archer