Program managers are sometimes said to have the most important job in the Department of Defense, but there is also another faction that views the program manager primarily as “caretaker” because PMs often have such short tenures, They move quickly from from one assignment to the next. Here is Walter Poole on some of that history:
… principle recommendation from the 1956 Robertson Committee to give program managers greater organizational status and authority. By 1961, the program manager’s circumstances had not much improved…
1963 “New London” conference on program management recommendations: 1) applied with discretion only in large, uncertain ventures; 2) flexibility and cooperation b/w program manager and existing functional orgs; 3) manager given greatest latitude. Couldn’t agree on how to implement specifics.
And here’s some more from the Providing the Means of War:
[DOD 5010.14 (1965)]… program managers should be available for at least 3 year tours…
[Ronald] Fox found a widespread conviction that the contractor had been hired to manage the program while the SPO’s main task lay in planning and controlling the rate of spending” …
In July 1986, five years after their introduction, more than half of a GAO sample of fifty-four program managers (who had been in their jobs more than two years) thought that the initiatives had made little or no difference in the acquisition process.
Under acquisition reform, program managers were being asked to “be more innovative” and “take more risks.” But Rand interviews with program management personnel in both the Army and industry clearly reflected a strong view that very little in terms of how resources (funds) were allocated and controlled, either within the Army or in the Defense Department, had changed to encourage program managers to take any more risks than they had before acquisition reform. Army program managers uniformly expressed the view that it made no sense for them to be held “responsible and accountable” for “total life-cycle system management” unless new resourcing methods were put in place that would give them the leverage and management authority to be able to deliver on that responsibility and legitimately be held accountable.
In 1984, Congress required PMs to serve a minimum of four years. A few years later, PM tenure actually decreased!
The same problems exists today, with PM tenures that are small fractions of the time it takes major weapon systems to work through the acquisition process. Certainly weapons programs take far too long due to all the bureaucracy. Ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines, and fighter aircraft used to take about 5 years in the 1950s. Today, the F-35 has been in a state of development for well over 20 years, and in “low rate initial production” for over a dozen years.
Some say that when a PM finally gets to the required pay scale, he or she only has a couple more years left until retirement and thus is already planning ahead for the “revolving door.” There doesn’t seem to be a path for younger or more permanent duties for military or even civilian officials to take these jobs, which could have massive returns. Ultimately, managing a program requires technical skills that cannot be learned in 1 or 2 years.
Any entrepreneur, however, can expect to at least spend 5 years on that project. We hear how commercial tech is surpassing DOD tech in many ways, but no one ever says, “this start-up will take twenty years and require 10 different entrepreneurs.”
The recent rapid acquisition reforms have tried to bring acquisition timelines down rather than PM tenures up (e.g., Section 804 for rapid acquisition, Section 806 for rapid prototyping, urgent capabilities, and accelerated acquisition). These authorities have all stressed bypassing various parts of the acquisition and requirements processes (though, not much guidance for funding). Even with these reforms, it is unlikely to have PM tenure matching the acquisition cycle. And even if you could, PM status is still far away from what Rickover corralled for himself in the early years of Naval Reactors.
When a program goes off the rails, the first person you want to hold into account is the PM. Yet because their tenure is so short, handed off between one and another, placing accountability on anyone of them is basically a random and perhaps unfair act. You cannot assign accountability without authority.
Holding a PM into account reminds me of Christopher Balding’s impressions of justice in China:
My lawyer colleague relayed that the most common word Chinese use when discussing people who have been jailed or arrested is a word from Chinese that roughly translates as “unlucky”. Divorced from any relationship to mechanical or cosmic justice, citizenry view the application of law and order as methodical as a lightning strike. The gods with no reason or understanding comprehensible to the mortals reach down and exact their justice.
For example, suppose there is a 10 year development which only admits trouble starting in the 7th year. That will probably be the the problem of the 3rd, 4th, or 5th Program Manager. To make that poor sap accountable does not strike me as fair. In fact, it’s not even the 1st Program Manager’s fault necessarily, since he was simple managing a program designed by a complex interaction of DOD and contractor bureaucracies based on cool brochures and hefty promises.
It used to be that the PM position for a military officer was a huge blow to their future, making flag officer grade difficult. Staying at any position more than 2 years would put them behind the curve in terms of resume builders, even if they couldn’t learn much from it. Even if the promotion issue has been fixed, going into the PM position is simply a gamble. It’s like musical chairs, get in and move on before something goes wrong and the lightning strikes on your career.
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