PROGRESS REPORT


In an interview Feb. 11 with Army AL&T magazine, Kendall offered his views on what DOD and specifically the Army are doing—and what they need to do next—to make acquisition work bet- ter for all concerned.


Army AL&T: What’s your response to some people’s claim that, as SAP execu- tive Tom Sisti put it, “We seem to be in a kind of procurement ‘Groundhog Day’ where we recycle through a lot of the same recommendations” for acquisition reform?


Kendall: We’ve tried to break that cycle. Tere is such a cycle, and the way I describe it is, we don’t like the performance we’re getting right now, so we tend to try to do something else, which is often something we’ve tried before with similar results. Some of the ideas that have been around a couple of times I’ve seen in my career: fixed-price development, for example, and, more recently, putting service chiefs more in charge of acquisition have come around a few times. I don’t think that either one is the path to success.


What I’ve tried to be is very consistent over the last few years on the suite of things that I would call the core parts of Better Buying Power that we’re trying to do to improve our performance—things like having competition and having competitive environments,


focusing on


cost-consciousness through the use of should-cost as a management tool, under- standing how to incentivize industry and using appropriate contract types. Tose are all very core things, and we need to be better at them. It’s not that we shouldn’t do something entirely different, it’s just that we should get better at the things that we already have the authority and the opportunity to do.


INNOVATION INITIATIVE


Watervliet Arsenal, NY, Machinist Peter Northup takes a measurement on a 60 mm mortar tube that he is machining. Rather than sticking to business as usual, a mindset that Kendall has worked to dispel, Northup took the initiative to identify a potential single point of failure, as well as possible cost savings, then designed ways to improve production. (Photo by John B. Snyder, Watervliet Arsenal Public Affairs)


Army AL&T: And how do we do that? Kendall:


It’s partly development


and


training, it’s partly constant attention, it’s partly providing tools to people so that they have a better basis to make decisions. When we did Better Buying Power 1.0, I refer to that as sort of focused on best practices, to have a list of best practices that we wanted people to follow. We weren’t trying to tell people to always use those practices, just that they should consider them as they went through their decision-making process.


In Better Buying Power 2.0, we focus much more on professionalism and


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providing tools to people to make good decisions. If you’re going to ask people to use the appropriate contract type, you need to give them some guidance on what to think about and what circumstances to use, what kind of contract. Te same is true with things like performance-based logistics, where we need to do more on the training and policy and guidance side to help people make better decisions and do a better job.


Army AL&T: You’ve spoken a number of times on the problem with the “school- house solution” and people having a knee-jerk reaction to recommenda- tions on this or that coming out—that


Army AL&T Magazine April–June 2015


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