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Let's Prove Them Wrong
By Brian Schultz853d ELSG/IA
Over the past 25 plus years, the NATO Airborne Early Warning and Control
System (AWACS) program has enjoyed a long and very successful history of
political success, operational effectiveness, and acquisition excellence.
The outstanding acquisition track record would face arguably its biggest
challenge with the NATO AWACS Mid-Term Modernization program, a $1.6 billion
upgrade to modernize the mission computing, sensors, and communications
system for the entire fleet of 17 aircraft. This leadership story describes
the issues a small group of mid-level leaders faced and how they turned a
potential disaster into a success story. While the agency’s senior
leadership was fully supportive and empowered the team to succeed, this
success story could not have happened without outstanding mid-level
leadership.
In the late 1990s, the NATO Mid-Term program ran into significant technical,
cost, and schedule problems that threatened the cancellation of the program.
As a result, the prime contractor, Boeing, and the AWACS System Program
Office (SPO) agreed to restructure the contract under what was commonly
referred to as the Global Solution contract modification. This new
arrangement established a new schedule, clarified scope and specifications,
and established new prices for work that was left to be completed. It also
increased the development ceiling price by $100 million as a result of an equitable
adjustment to Boeing.
Senior leadership of the USAF, including Mrs. Darleen Druyun, the former
number two acquisition official at US Air Force (USAF) Headquarters, were
deeply involved in re-negotiating this Global Solution contract agreement.
It was later determined that due to the legal issues (and subsequent
conviction of Mrs. Druyun for violating a conflict of interest laws in her
dealings with Boeing) that this contract would be reviewed by the DoD
Inspector General to determine if this particular contract action was
tainted based on Mrs. Druyun’s involvement and to determine if proper
business and contracting processes were followed. The DoD IG completed their
audit and determined that the Air Force had not followed proper procedures and
that it was not possible to determine if the production prices were fair and
reasonable. This resulted in the re-opening of the contract with a lengthy
technical evaluation to re-negotiate the production prices. Concurrently
with this IG investigation, the AWACS SPO was responsible for executing the
program, which was a very complex and technically challenging effort. What
follows is an account of some of the actions the SPO took to respond to this
challenge.
When I first arrived as the Deputy Director of the International Division,
it was immediately clear that the NATO AWACS Mid-term program was in
trouble. Several of the team members told me of the technical challenges,
the low morale, and the constant crisis management mode the program seemed
to be in. A few key members of the SPO staff encountered health problems
(including more than one heart attack), possibly tied to the stress of the
troubled program.
A poor relationship existed between the NATO AWACS Program management Agency
(NAPMA) and the SPO. One of the first meetings I attended at Boeing included
a shouting match between the program managers of the SPO and NAPMA. It
concluded with one of the program managers walking out angry and slamming
his fist against a wall. NAPMA and the SPO were also at odds on the health
of the program as evidenced by conflicting risk assessments. On top of this,
we had to respond to the DoD IG and an unhappy customer (the operational
user who would receive the system), who was continually re-assessing their
requirements for the system.
In December 2003, my boss (the SPO Director)
asked me--the new guy on the scene--to visit Boeing with members of the SPO program management team and
conduct a short review of the program. The thought was that I would be able
to look at the program with fresh eyes and assess the program’s health and
the use of appropriate processes.
I was impressed by the caliber of people I encountered at the SPO, Boeing,
and at NAPMA. Many of these people had been working on the program well
before the Global Solution contract’s execution so there was also a great
deal of corporate knowledge. After listening to several briefings and asking
many questions, I believed the team was doing the right things to execute
the program--with a few caveats.
The first issue I noticed was that the various teams were not managing to a
common set of documented project risks. Many of the functional teams
(software engineering, test and evaluation, logistics, etc) had identified
risks, but there was little coordination among the teams and no consolidated
list that the team had documented and agreed upon. We agreed that at all
future meetings one set of risks (and one set of data) would be tracked and
updated, and risk owners would be accountable to show what actions were
taken and what results were achieved in mitigating the risks.
The second issue we uncovered was that we were not all in agreement over how
we were measuring progress. The team was managing against a schedule but
there was no single set of progress metrics that accurately reflected where
we were in terms of real progress. While this may seem like an easy fix, it
was not that simple for a program requiring compliance with hundreds of
requirements to ensure the system met system standards. We worked
together to develop one set of program metrics that would be tracked and
reported on weekly against an integrated master plan. The result was that
the team could now see exactly where we were on the plan and what issues and
risks needed attention.
The next initiative was building better morale. I conducted many interviews
during our visit and I noticed that answers to my questions always seemed to
come back to “always fighting fires, don’t have time to do my job, and how
are we going to do all this work”. The obvious answer to that was “We have a
plan and we know who is working the plan and managing the risks, so let’s
resource the plan and determine if we have enough people to do the job. If
we find out we don’t have enough people, let’s go ask for the staff we
need.”
While this sounds easy, the staffing for NATO AWACS acquisitions is a very
complicated and politically charged process. The NAPMO Board of Directors
must approve the manpower, requiring unanimous approval of all the NAPMO
nations. Further, it would involved a great deal of work and scrutiny since
the NAPMO nations had already invested significantly more funding in the
program than originally envisioned due to the Global Solution contract
modification. Asking for more staffing (and the budget to go with it) was
sure to be a tough sell.
To no one’s surprise, we determined that we did indeed need more people to
do the work. Now the challenge was to convince senior USAF leadership that
this was an issue that needed to be resolved. Once we got the USAF on board,
the discussions with NAPMA and the NAPMO nations was required. It took a lot
of negotiating and heated debates but eventually we succeeded in getting
13 additional full-time acquisition specialists to manage the
program to completion.
While the knowledge
that reinforcements were on the way boosted people’s spirits, I believe it
was equally important to the team members that their leadership had
fought hard to get the resources that the team needed to succeed. It wasn’t long after the
additional staff showed up that I again asked how people were doing and
clearly the mood had changed for the better. The staff now had time to go
home at a more reasonable hour, eat dinner with their families, and take
much needed vacations. Now we just needed to get through the last phase of
the development program and initial production activities.
Another nagging issue we had was the poor working relationship between the
NAPMA and the USAF SPO. This friction was caused by several factors but
clearly one of the major reasons was their overlapping roles and
responsibilities. When two organizations appear to be working the same
tasks, conflict is sure to result.
While NAPMA was designated as the overall management agency for the entire
program with authority to plan, coordinate, contract, administer and expend
funds, the SPO believed it was responsible for the program’s cost, schedule,
and technical performance of the NATO Mid-term program. The SPO/NAPMA
relationship was exploring somewhat new territory due to the fact that the
initial aircraft purchase and subsequent upgrades had traditionally been executed in a
cooperative type arrangement. In other words, both the USAF and NATO fleets
normally fielded essentially the same upgrades and could pool resources to
manage the program. Fleet configurations were very similar. Now with NATO
Mid-Term, the fleets were diverging in a big way. NATO Mid-Term was not part
of the USAF modernization plan. In fact, the USAF, for various reasons,
started their own similar upgrade program later, and with a very different
solution.
To address the working relationship, the team proposed an off-site to define
exactly how the two organizations would work together. The off-site would be
led by the project managers from each organization and would bring the key players
together. A neutral location was selected and the teams “slugged” it out for
over two full days. The end result was a clear agreement on roles and
responsibilities that was documented and signed by both parties. The other
important result of this exercise was that both teams not only agreed to the
outcome, they also contributed to it. While there were occasional issues and
disagreements between the teams afterward, this off-site resulted in a
significant improvement in teamwork. The SPO and NAPMA were now working as a
cohesive team.
The final aspect of this turnaround was motivation. How could we motivate a
team that had worked so hard for so long without anything to show for it
other than a lot of scrutiny, criticism, and investigations?
While it was clear that many observers shared a bleak outlook for the program,
it was also clear that failure would be a huge disaster. I believed that the
team was now on track to execute the program and we had completed several
interim milestones that gave us added confidence. I also believed that we
could use the negative outlook of outsiders to our advantage in motivating
the team. Just like football teams sometimes use the negative comments of
competitors to motivate the team before the big game, I occasionally
reminded the team of comments by the naysayers who had said we would never
make it and the system would never work. We all wanted to prove them wrong.
On one occasion I told a senior official that we had successfully
accomplished a major milestone and later found out that the official asked
others to verify my statement because it was so hard to believe that we had come
so far. Given the history of the program, I could understand the skepticism.
One of the other motivational tools was challenging the team to achieve
challenging but realistic stretch goals. The idea was that the team worked
to achieve the stretch goals and if they could not make it, they could still
make the on-time date which gave us a buffer.
As we got closer to meeting the milestones that we worked so hard to
achieve, the team kept their focus on the final objective and was able to
overcome frustrating but small last-minute setbacks. After a long road that started with
the September 2002 Global Solution contract, the NATO AWACS N-2 Aircraft
entered the production and retrofit center in Manching, Germany in November
2005 to become the first operational jet outfitted with the NATO Mid-term
upgrade. Nearly one year later, a celebration and ceremony was conducted in
Manching, Germany to witness the handover of this aircraft to the
operational commander. This was nearly the exact schedule that was
envisioned as part of the Global Solution. What a turn-around this was! It
was an honor and a privilege for me to be part of this team – for all those
naysayers, we proved them wrong!
©2008 GovLeaders.org
