Examples Of Records Of Duty Daily Form: Fill & Download for Free

Product management, as a discipline, is in its infancy. As the role continues to "grow up," here are some areas where I predict big changes are coming.1. Bots collaborating with product managers.Current product management tools are designed to work for product managers. E.g., Product managers can conceptualize A/B tests with Optimizely, communicate priorities with Pivotal Tracker, or explore user behavior patterns with Mixpanel. Use of these tools is typically initiated by the product manager for a preconceived purpose.I predict that we're going to see software play an increasingly active role in the product management process. The explosion of the Slack platform, for example, provides a perfect foundation. In Slack, humans and bots operate both as members of the same team. We're seeing early examples of Slack bots offload repetitive aspects of the product management process. E.g., Tatsu is a bot that initiates and records daily standup meetings. My side project, Double-Loop, will leverage Slack to automatically communicate launches to the broader team and prompt product management to assess the performance of changes weeks after after launch. This is just the beginning. Imagine bots initiating many product development workflows.Furthermore, we're going to increasingly see tools like The Grid where machines plays an active role in the actual design of the product. Software won't be relegated to only measuring the success of products designed by humans. With the massive amount of data inputs at play in product design, machines will often be best equipped to take the first stab. Product managers will play a vital role in molding the creations of the machines and crafting inputs to reflect user, business, and technology needs.2. The death of product roadmaps.A key element of product management is to lead teams through agile or lean development processes that emphasize small iterations of work with tight feedback loops. It's becoming increasingly understood how this spirit of tinkering and experimentation leads to the surprising discoveries at the heart of great products.Yet most companies have still not embraced agility in long term strategic planning. Product managers are still expected to deliver "product roadmaps" intended to provide a predictable view of a company's future investment and timeline. As many product managers know, information uncovered with each project significantly changes the product outlook, yet most of us agree to generate the illusion of static roadmaps to make the rest of the organization feel comfortable. Ultimately, this will change and new forms of long term planning will emerge that embrace flux and bottom-up project emergence. The forms this will take are still unknown. Maybe Product Rhizomes?3. Wide spread understanding.While demand for product management is growing, many companies do not yet have a sharp understanding of what makes the role unique. Often I see job descriptions reduce the role to that of a coordinator organizing the work of a cross-functional team. While acting as the connective tissue between design, engineering, and business is key to product management, more companies will start to appreciate that product managers play an active role in designing the streams of work around a product, the framework of measuring success, and the product structure. I elaborate on the unique duties of product management in my post A Nameless Design Craft and my answer to What is product management?As the role becomes better articulated, we're to go to see the discourse about product management methodology explode. We'll see companies refine their hiring process in surprising ways to bubble up the individuals best suited for the role. Imagine interview exercises around ordering a project backlog in the face of environmental flux.-----For more of my ideas on product management, see my blog Product Logic.

During 30 years active Army service, and a subsequent almost 10 years in a state wildlife management agency, I frequently observed that perhaps the cheapest way to conduct research is to, in a public venue (much enhanced by today’s social media), unreservedly announce that some event was the first/last/only occurrence, or to similarly state that something never/always happened.So doing will grant you almost immediate access to a veritable tidal wave of sources (some of them incredibly obscure) and expertise devoted to proving you wrong . . . often simultaneously questioning the legitimacy of your birth, your parents’ marital status, your eduction, and your right to draw another breath.I was reminded of this when I read another answer to this question that, among other things, categorically denied that Soviet soldiers were forced into battle unarmed and that the “NKVD never did machine gun their own people.”About half of my military career was Cold War, so the Soviets were a subject of intense personal and professional interest. I pulled together the hours for a minor in Soviet history prior to my commissioning, had uncounted man days of formal military training on Soviet military tactics, techniques and equipment, and added several hundred volumes on the Russian Revolution, Soviet political history, and the Great Patriotic War (WWII in our parlance) to my personal library.Suffice it to say that a thorough read of respected tactical level histories of combat on the Russian front is replete with documented examples of Soviet units being committed to combat without personal weapons. While ancillary to the question asked, it is also clear that Commissars and NKVD units considered summary execution on the battlefield to be a necessary tactic, particularly in desperate conditions, of which Stalingrad certainly was a significant example.One of the more pertinent resources for the question at hand is a series of early 1950s Department of the Army Pamphlet (DA PAM) historical studies of German lessons learned from combat on the Russian front. These studies were generated as part of an intense effort started during the war (and extending years after) by Army field history units to document German combat tactics and methods. The knowledge provided in these publications was gained by battlefield POW interrogations, post-war collection and debriefing of German generals, staff officers, and other key leaders, and a deep dive into millions of captured German war records, particularly after action reports. In keeping with continuing Army policy, no authors are listed, but it is known that noted military historian S.L.A. Marshall was at least one of those involved. The two volumes I used for this answer are DA Pam 20–230 Russian Combat Method in WWII (1950) and (one of my all time favorite bits of WWII history) DA PAM 20–269 Small Unit Actions During the German Campaign in Russia (1953).Among examples noted are massed formations of unarmed Russian soldiers marched shoulder-to-shoulder into German defenses south of Leningrad to clear the German minefields and obstacles. The Germans also documented numerous examples from their almost wildly successful advances during the summer of 1941 during which the Soviet military drafted civilians from threatened cities and villages and threw them into battle with little or no training and the expectation that they would arm themselves by scavenging weapons from dead/wounded Soviet soldiers.A more specific example is provided by the defense against a major Soviet offensive on a village occupied by Company G of the 464th Infantry Regiment in January 1942: “The first wave of Russian Infantry, some 400 men strong, emerged from the forest [approximately 1000 yards away] on a broad front. It was evident that the 3-foot snow was causing them great difficulty. The concentrated fire of the German heavy weapons succeeded in halting the attack after it had advanced about 200 yards. After a short while a second, equally large wave emerged from the forest. It advanced in the tracks of the first and carried the attack forward, over and beyond the line of dead. . . . The Russians advanced an additional 200 yards , then bogged down under the effective German small arms fire. . . . The members of the third Russian assault wave emerged from the forest unarmed. However they armed themselves quickly with the weapons of their fallen comrades and continued to attack. . . . As so often happened during the winter of 1941–42, the Russians attacked in several waves on a given front, each successive wave passing the dead of the preceding and carrying the attack forward to a point where it, too, was destroyed. Some waves started out unarmed and recovered the weapons from their fallen comrades.” [DA PAM 20–269, p. 21–23]Other indicators of the Soviet situation include:1-The Soviet 13th Guards Division [Guards units were considered elite] arrived in Stalingrad short 2,000 rifles [Enemy at the Gates by William Craig]. I suspect the attack without rifles scene in the movie may be derived from the 13th Guards’ arrival in Stalingrad when its first units immediately attacked from the landing beach to stop advancing German units, some of which were only 100 yards from the shore. As an aside, Craig’s book includes a detailed description of the “Sniper Duel” between the Soviet Vassili Zaitsev and German Major Konings. Zaitsev won.2-”The Germans never ceased to be astonished at the profligacy of Russian commanders with their men’s lives. One of the worst examples came during the defensive battles west of the Don. Three battalions of (Soviet) trainee officers, without weapons or rations, were sent against the 16th Panzer Division. Their commander, who surrendered after the massacre, told his captors that when he had protested “about this senseless task”, the Army Commander, who was clearly drunk, had bellowed at him to get on with it.” [Stalingrad by Antony Beevor] Beevor’s book also includes dozens of specific examples of Soviet summary executions at Stalingrad.Frankly, after reading several dozen accounts of the Battle of Stalingrad — which is where this question originated — far from exaggerating, the movie barely scratched the surface of the actual horror, agony and brutality of that battle.As always, simply my opinion.CAVEATS:1-Early (1941–1942) examples of soldiers attacking unarmed may often be accounted for by the almost total disruption of frontline Soviet logistics. They may have had the weapons, but simply not have been able to get them to the points of need. That said, since not opposing the German invasion was not an option, even if the Soviets did not have the guns, they did (at this point in the war) have the people and they were thrown at the Germans in repeated massed assaults until late in the war when orders to conserve manpower were issued as a result of near exhaustion of Soviet manpower reserves.2-The Soviets (as did the Germans) had penal units composed of officers and men who had fallen afoul of the Soviet rules and regulations, often related to the so called “Not One Step Back” order issued in 1942. These units (which included air combat units) were committed to the most desperate, often suicidal, missions and may have, on occasion, been committed unarmed. NKVD units that “backstopped” attacking/defending Soviet units were likely to round up retreating/reluctant soldiers for commitment to penal units rather than shooting them out of hand.ADDENDUM — 10 JANUARY 2020: One of the benefits of retirement is having pretty much all the time one might want to go off on research tangents. As a result of this query I, again, dug into Soviet WWII casualties. This is an aspect of the war that is still being hotly debated in Russia and it is only now starting to come into better focus as more records become available to be run thru modern data crunching tools. The most common currently accepted numbers for Soviet wartime dead fall between 25 and 30 million, although some more recent analyses considering all non-natural WWII-era deaths in the Soviet Union are pushing toward 40 million. I came across some numbers that seem pertinent to the question at hand: 994,000 Soviet military personnel were convicted of offenses during the war. Of these, 135,000 were executed and 422,000 were sent to front line penal units where they apparently died (there is no record of their having been discharged at the end of the war). To put that in perspective, during WWII the British executed 306 military personnel and the U.S. military executed 102.A REALLY long ADDENDUM — 14 January 2020:Observations that prod one’s thinking should always be appreciated and critical thinking should always be encouraged. Rather than reply to the really quite mild criticism this answer has received, I thought I’d take it on in the body of the answer. This is the part of Quora I really love: Being driven to test my thinking.The Sources Used are “wildly innacurate”:Fully concur that there are historical sources (and not just Cold War era) that deliberately distort the truth. In most cases, the antidote is to widely range thru the available source material to test the question at issue. Generally, deliberate falsification/fabrication does not survive thoughtful crosschecking.In my opinion, the more difficult problem is winnowing out the unintentional error that creeps into first-hand history. During a talk I listened in on during the week I spent at Gettysburg for the 150th anniversary, the presenter noted how maddening it is trying to mesh all the official field reports and diary accounts of the battle simply because there was no place for the officers to get “the” actual time. If they forgot to wind their watches or the shock of field duty had damaged the mechanism, then the time they recorded was approximate at best. Regiments standing shoulder-to-shoulder would record significantly different times for the same eventMost historical research tends to seek sources as close to first-hand as possible; recognizing, of course, that sometimes the closer one is to the fight, the narrower the perspective of the observer. I’m reminded of the many personal accounts of the Civil War in which veterans remember being surprised when ordered to retreat because their regiment was kicking butt on its part of the battlefield. In the question at hand, while the DA PAMs I cite are anonymously authored, what is known about the methodology is that it applied considerable rigor, within the limits of working in a devastated Europe, and used unit daily reports, interviews and other materials to crosscheck their observations. Are daily unit reports sacrosanct? No. But they do represent the perspective and understanding of the units and individuals involved as close to the actual event as it is possible for us to get. The DA PAM sources have some innate veracity, but, in my opinion, their greater veracity derives form the fact they test extremely well against multiple, accepted, more general sources. That said, if history teaches anything it is that facts change as new data and sources emerge. Given the history of the Soviet Union, this will be true about the Russian front for decades to come as more and more records emerge from the nooks and crannies.“There never was a real sniper duel … Do you have any source otherwise for the sniper duel?”A somewhat oblique approach to the question: Have you submitted to similar scrutiny, your source for the belief it DIDN’T happen?What seems to be the primary source for the story is Vasily Zaitzev’s personal account in his book “Notes of a Russian Sniper”. I take this version of his account from the Russian News Website Russiapedia: “In his memoirs, Vasily recalls a certain sly Nazi sniper he tracked for a week – they called him the “Supersniper.” He was allegedly Heinz Thorvald, aka Erwin König, a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer and head of the Berlin sniper school. There is little known about König’s identity. He reportedly came to Stalingrad to kill Zaitsev, who had already caused much havoc and drained Nazi morale. Zaitsev writes that the sniper was highly skilled and was very hard to find. But when two of Vasily’s comrades were injured by a sniper, Zaitsev and Kulikov began searching the area, and Vasily noticed a glimpse of light under a piece of metal. When Kulikov lifted a helmet on a stick from a window, Erwin König fired and revealed himself as he peeked to see whether his target was dead. It was then that Zaitsev shot him in the head.”Although I doubt I would bet a paycheck on it either way, it seems pretty straight forward. While I have seen no (to me) credible sources that question Zaitsev was, in fact, the superb sniper he is purported to be, his account of this specific event has been challenged.I suspect it is the criticism in Frank Ellis’ book “Stalingrad Cauldron” or Michael Peck’s “War is Boring” article citing it, that is the source for the skepticism. I have not read Ellis’ book, but it was published by a very reputable academic press and is well reviewed, so I have no doubt it reflects his professional assessment of the material he covers. I have read Peck’s article. I enjoy and respect his work and have no reason to believe his recount of Ellis’ perspective on the sniper duel is not accurate. In Peck’s opinion Ellis book “shoots the story full of holes” . . . and I am sure the pun was fully intended. In the end, Peck retains enough uncertainty to still label the story “probably not true” rather than outright myth.I find Ellis’ critique somewhat less compelling, for example:No mention in German records of a German Sniper named Konig nor was there a sniper school in Berlin when Stalingrad was fought: This certainly gives one pause. Zaitzev’s account indicates he and his spotter dragged the body back to their lines and turned over the papers they found on it, which would have likely included his pay book/Soldbuch and thus his name (German ID tags did not include names, just units and the soldier’s unit number). That said, I don’t know that either Zaitzev or his spotter read German or that they would have gone thru the documents rather than simply handing them in. As the Russiapedia article notes, other sources have provided other possible names for the German. Certainly Zaitsev would not be the first veteran whose recollections of the chaos of war got a name wrong. Almost anyone who has had the privilege of listening to veterans speak of the memories burned into their minds has encountered a vivid memory that simply doesn’t align with the hard, known facts. Did that happen in this case? Unknown.With regard to the Berlin Sniper School not existing. May be a wholly accurate observation. I am unable to find any ready reference to the location of German sniper schools. Absent confidence that the German records have been exhaustively mined on this point, it is hard to tell. Given the importance Berlin represented, the idea of a sniper school there is not hard to believe, particularly since the difference between a sniper school and no sniper school can be as simple as a trained sniper being told to set up a range and train some soldiers. If you look up the 2ID sniper school in Korea in the early 1990s it is almost impossible to find any reference to its existence. I was the Division Deputy G3 at the time. The school fell under the G3. It existed. I saw it. Again, all this is reason for pause, but not, in the context of the chaos and destruction of WWII, definitive. Is there a record definitively indicating there wasn’t such a school in Berlin or the Berlin area, or simply no record saying there was?No specific dates for the event. From Peck’s article: “Ellis also notes that while Zaitsev usually provides specific dates in his book, there is no date for when he killed Konig,” going on to note that, given the “vast amount of interest in this duel…it is striking that no Soviet account provides the precise date.” Incorrect or missing dates (or the fact that “usually” doesn’t mean always) are among the most common challenges in working with history. Missing or incorrect dates are a continual plague on historical research.Sunlight glinting off the German rifle or scope. Peck indicates Ellis notes Zaitzev spotted a flash of sunlight from the German’s position and, from that, determines the German “must have been facing west into the setting sun, even though the German lines were facing east,” and, because Zaitsev indicates the German “was in the no man’s land in front of German lines” it suggests he was facing east. Two thoughts: First, a look at the more detailed maps of the Stalingrad battle space indicates so many bends, turns, salients and pockets of resistance that “no mans land” was a tormented collection of twisted bits and pieces. So orientation to the enemy could be almost any direction on any given day. Second, I took my signal mirror (a constant companion since my first survival course in the 1960s) outside and marked off the arc of sun glint: I was surprised to note that the sun spot off my mirror extended in an arc of approximately 320 degrees. It wasn’t until I had the mirror turned almost perpendicular to the sun that the sun spot disappeared. That being the case, depending on the sun’s position, Zaitsev could have been as much as 90 degrees left or right of the German’s position.Poor field craft by the German sniper. Peck’s article notes Ellis’ question: “Zaitsev shows himself to be aware of the hazard of sunlight…Are we to believe that his formidable opponent was not, and that he made this elementary and fatal error?” Well, yeah. It’s not even unlikely, just one of those things that happens despite one’s training and skill. A moment’s inattention. A military version of “shit happens.” I remember our venomous snakes instructor at Florida Ranger Camp back in the early 70s. This Master Sergeant had taught this class dozens, perhaps hundreds of times. We were sitting in the instruction bleachers as he stood there with an array of boxes at his feet. He opened one, made a quick grab and came out holding an Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake behind the head (I’ve always thought Easterns are among the most evil looking snakes I’ve ever seen). It was long, really fat, and wrapped itself around the instructor’s left arm as he gestured with is right hand and expoundied on the animal’s habits, danger, and nutritional value. Someone to his right flank asked him a question. As he turned to the questioner his left hand turned with him, but his right remained poised at mid-chest. He regained situational awareness when the Eastern drove its fangs into his right hand. He continued the class to completion (about 20 minutes) by which time an Army field ambulance had backed up to the instruction stand. They opened the back doors and he went over, sat on the floor and delivered his final instruction. At that point the medics closed the doors and the ambulance left. I saw him back at the camp after the 12-day patrol and he appeared fine. My point (besides just enjoying the story) is that even consummate professionals make mistakes.Lack of official records on the duel. As Peck notes, Zaitsev indicates he and his spotter dragged the German’s body back to Soviet lines and delivered his documents to their Division commander. Ellis indicates he has “yet to come across a single Soviet or post-Soviet source that provides any details of these documents.” Of course, one explanation could be as simple as the courier taking the documents back across the Volga from the Division HQ got blown to bits en route or sank into the Volga when a transit boat was sunk by a Stuka. Alternatively, they just haven’t been found yet. Previously unknown records of the Great Patriotic War continue to come to light. Until Stalin’s death, the record of the war was what he said it was and it was dangerous to be too inquisitive. Even with his death, regular access to Soviet archives was almost unheard of as the Soviet culture of secrecy was quite rigid. In his huge work “The Gulag Archipelago,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes one of the “Secret” documents he was allowed to access as a prisoner in one of the scientific Gulags. From his description, it sounds like a copy of the U.S. magazine “Popular Mechanics.” Without having spent a day in a Russian archive, I am willing to state categorically that there are hordes of WWII records that have yet to see the light of day. I got my card to research in the U.S. National Archives when I was assigned to the Pentagon in August 2001. Unfortunately 9/11 intervened, but I continued my interest in the Archives and noted regularly that some new significant document was discovered even in archives that had for decades invited public scrutiny. In the late 90s I was informed that some boxes had been found in the basement of our Stuttgart HQ, an old Wehrmacht building that had been a U.S. military office since 1945. Markings on the boxes indicated they contained U.S. Army records from the end of the war. There was no indication they had ever been opened since being stored sometime in the late 1940s. We shipped them off to the National Archives. Who knows what was in them? Who knows how many more exist? I have to believe the same is even more true for Russia.In the end, I think it it easy to fall in line with where Peck seems to end up (and I ask his forgiveness if I have inaccurately paraphrased him): That Zaitsev did kill a sniper (his record from Stalingrad lists 11 snipers among his kills) and that story evolved into a personal duel with a German “super-sniper”. I suspect the story could even be something of an amalgam of facts from various kills he made at Stalingrad that some Commissar decided to embellish further for the morale value.All that said, in the end we have Zaitsev’s story, some discrepancies/gaps in the story, and some — in my opinion — suggestive-but-somewhat-flawed critical analysis. That such a duel occurred is not impossible. To declare it a myth, I think, remains premature.Attacks by unarmed Soviet Infantry and NKVD executions are exaggerated. My read agrees with the observation that the evidence indicates most such attacks occurred in the early, most desperate days of WWII, i.e., 1941-42. If my sensing is true, the same record indicates that this was not an especially rare event then. There are records of such events occurring later in the war. If accurate, I suspect most if not all were conducted by some of the 420,000+ soldiers assigned to Penal Units who appear (strict record keeping in these units does not seem to have been a priority) to have died in Soviet Penal Battalion operations. With regard to NKVD/SMERSH executions, someone pulled the trigger on the 135,000 soldiers the Soviets record as having been executed in WWII. Such work was clearly consistent with the NKVD/SMERSH mission. Ultimately I would turn the question around: Exaggerated as compared to what? It wasn’t 500,000 executed it was “only” 135,000? It wasn’t 500 unarmed attacks or minefield clearing marches, it was only 50? As compared with such activities by American and British forces? As compared with the Germans?I don’t find such observations accusatory toward the Soviets or, now, the Russians. Their war was horrific beyond most people’s ability to imagine and their alternatives for dealing with the stunning early German successes were very limited. They faced the very real possibility of extinction, fought as they could, took losses I do not think any of their allies could have absorbed, and won.

The short answer is yes, there are circumstances in which recording can be legally stopped.There are currently a number of federal court of appeal decisions upholding the First Amendment right of bystanders to record the activity of police in a public place. Those decisions have found unconstitutional laws that make such recording illegal. As yet, there is no Supreme Court decision on the subject, but there are no conflicts between different courts of appeal on the question. As a lawyer, these laws making all recording illegal seem to be plainly unconstitutional. They are justified based on the idea that it allegedly makes the work of cops unsafe if being recorded. A lot of restrictions on behavior around cops are upheld based on this general logic, such as detaining or even handcuffing bystanders directly involved in a crime event but otherwise innocent.But there is a strong competing interest here, which is recording actual events and holding public officials accountable. That may throw cops off their game during a crime event, which allegedly impacts their safety. Everyone behaves with extra caution and perhaps more restraint if being filmed, which could undermine what is needed. But the idea is that a public official should always act in an accountable manner as if the behavior was always being filmed. The discomfort from filming comes from the fact that we typically are not being filmed in our daily routines, so go about our usual business without the extra scrutiny of a recording of every tiny detail. But the rulings have been that this minor imposition is a good thing, and public officials should accept and expect such recording, and always behave in such a fashion that assumes their conduct is being filmed and subject to future detailed scrutiny. In other words, the somewhat weak justification that it undermines performance because of inhibitions if being recorded is outweighed by the benefit of an important public function being carried out with fidelity to the duties owed by public officials.However, I am sure that there are theoretical circumstances in which recording an arrest could be prevented. The court decisions have not upheld a right to record in all circumstances, but have instead invalidated laws making any recording illegal. There is a big gray area in between, and the law is still in flux.The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) issued a policy paper titled https://www.theiacp.org/resources/policy-center-resource/recording-police-activity “Recording Police Activity.” The document acknowledges that videotaping on-duty police work is “a form of speech” covered by the First Amendment. But the paper lists five examples of police “interference” that individuals “who wish to record police must observe.” Those are:Keeping a “reasonable distance” from officers.Not “repeatedly engaging officers with questions or distractions that unduly hinder police activities to protect life and safety, or the integrity of a crime scene.”Not positioning "themselves in a manner that would either passively or actively hinder, impede” officers, first responders or traffic.Not filming “sensitive police operations and tactical situations if they could reasonably jeopardize the safety of officers or third parties,” for example, a police response to a school shooting.Not violating “the privacy of victims and witnesses.”With those rules in place, anyone filming officers -– even in public places –- is at risk for arrest, “rightly or wrongly depending on the facts, on charges ranging from disorderly conduct and obstructing with an arrest to eavesdropping and the failure to obey an order to stop filming.”This is a developing area of the law. It needs clear rules which do not yet exist.