The Command Staff and Senior Officers

With the Division growing at a steady rate, the work required to effectively manage the Division has also increased. Promethean is now home to almost 100 TSN Officers, and there are 3 fully crewed TSN ships in service, all under my command.

Now that I have a trusted core of Senior Officers, I have started delegating some of the tasks required to manage the Division. The first responsibility assigned was the management of the Officer Records. Each ship captain has an assigned crew, and all those captain have access to their officers' records. The responsibility for keeping them fully up-to-date is now that of the captains. So far it has worked well, and the captains are showing me that I can trust them with such tasks.

There has been an overall general restructuring of the way that Senior Officers work too, particularly those in command. I regard the current Senior Officers as being a "temporary" command staff, in that they are given assigned tasks, or involved in making decisions about the running of the Division. As the number of Senior Officers grows, only a small selection of them (around 5 or 6) will make up the actual Division Command staff. Other Senior Officers will be involved in Senior Officer meetings, which are a relatively new idea to allow regular meetings before a duty shift, however it would be the Command Staff who make the final decisions about the Division.

Until now, much of what I have done to manage and develop the Division has been done solely by me, and I have kept a tight control over the Division. I have always intended giving others greater responsibility, but only to those who have proved to me that they can do so in a way that will not compromise what has been created. The current 'temporary' Command Staff have progressed from cadet through each rank. At each point, they have fulfilled the requirements of that rank virtaully to the letter. They have become close colleagues and proved that they can be trusted with some of the most important tasks. They have not tried to contradict, change or compromise the current systems in place, but instead have given ideas and worked to develop the Division. And when an idea has been dismissed, they have not been deterred, or taken it personally. The trust that I now place in them has been earned over time, and now I hope they can prove that that trust is well placed.