In 1986, the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management (Packard Commission) published A Quest for Excellence, Final Report to the President. Subsequently, National Security Directive 219 directed implementation of the recommendations in the report and the Goldwater-Nichols Act incorporated many of the recommendations into law.
This study examines one aspect of the Commission’s report, Acquisition Organization and Procedures, and addresses how well the Army has implemented the spirit as well as the content of the recommendations. A structured questionnaire was sent to the 318 personnel who had served as Program/Project/Product Managers since the publication of the Packard Commission Report and were still employed by the government in November 1990. A total of 225 responded.
The study concluded that neither the spirit nor the content of the Packard Commission recommendations has been implemented by the Army. The major findings include: the organizational structures and procedures recommended by the Commission added to, rather than replaced, the old way of doing business; the changes neither added stability, nor streamlined reporting; better and earlier coordination was found to be needed between the acquisition and testing communities; and the inability of the war fighters to define and defend requirements precludes effective acquisition reform.
That was a report by Henry Jehan for the Army War College in 1991. Read pages 50-60. Here’s another piece:
The Packard Commission recommended that the PM should have the authority to accept or reject the positions of the various interest groups within the Army and that the PEO should have clear authority to resolve conflicts. This is not the case. The PMs are politically whipped about by a variety of interest groups, both internal and external to the Army, all of which have the power to slow down or stop a program.
And here’s the best part, which is another reminder that I haven’t been the only person trumpeting the idea of organizational budgets which do not constrain PM freedom to exercise management by real-options:
… program stability is a joke…
The funds for all the programs under the management control of a PEO should be given to the PEO in a single account. The PEO should have the authority to freely manage and reprogram the funds so that optimal accomplishment of all programs/projects/products is achieved. The Congress should limit their participation in this process to authorizing or prohibiting an acquisition at the critical program junctures and providing funding to the group of programs managed by the PEO. The funding managed by the PEO should be protected or fenced from all operational accounts.
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