PROGRESS REPORT
program management professionalism and strengthening our program manag- ers, having more tenure for them so that they can stay in their positions longer and finding ways to compensate those who do a good job. And also, in some cases, hold accountable people who are not doing such a good job.
I’m more a carrot than a stick person as far as this is concerned. I think we need to reward good performance and attract the best talent possible to our senior lead- ership positions in acquisition, whether it’s program management or engineering, contracting, testing or another field. So I’m encouraged by that. Our legislative initiative did not address that directly, but I am very interested in working with Congress on ways to strengthen our senior leaders.
Army AL&T: What significant progress do you think we have made in strength- ening senior leadership?
Kendall: I think we have made some progress in terms of defining the quali- fication requirements for key leadership positions, and there are several of them that apply. One of our career fields has started having a professional certification board as a pilot program; this is the devel- opmental test community. And some of the other fields, I think, are going to fol- low that. I’m leaving this to the career field managers to make their own deci- sions on this. I don’t want to impose this on people. It needs to be a grassroots thing that the career field embraces.
I think we are holding people accountable in the sense that—we started this some time ago—all of my acquisition decision memorandums carry in their first para- graph the name of the program manager and program executive officer who brought the system forward and recommended
18
PRESERVING CAPABILITIES
CW2 Pedro Alvarado, retrosort yard accountability officer attached to the 82nd Sustainment Brigade – U.S. Central Command Materiel Recovery Element (82nd SB-CMRE) at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, describes the retrosort operation to Kendall, who was visiting Kandahar Airfield Feb. 9, 2014. Kendall says DOD needs to preserve the capability established during Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom to respond quickly when operational commanders need that. (U.S. Army photo by SFC Jon Cupp, 82nd SB-CMRE Public Affairs)
the decision to go forward, so that there’s some historical reference there and some accountability. I would like to keep some of our best talent around. I’m looking for ways we might do that. I see too many of our best program managers at the grade roughly of O-6, colonel or maybe captain, leaving because they don’t make it to the star level in their service, and these are enormously capable people who’ve devel- oped a huge body of expertise and are very talented. I’d like to find a way to keep those people around longer.
Army AL&T: Our “Critical Tinking” Q&A with GEN Perkins [GEN David G. Perkins, commanding general of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command], in the current January-March issue, was a very good conversation regarding the Army operating concept, what it means and what it accomplishes, what it doesn’t accomplish, and why it’s necessary. We got into the issue of acquisition and how that fits
into the requirements picture,
and his conclusion seems to be that the current system is based so heavily on pro- grams of record that it’s hard to respond to changing needs and evolving threats. What’s your thinking on that?
Kendall: I think we need more flexibil- ity in our acquisition system. But I think the fact that they’re programs of record really shouldn’t limit that. We have, for example, configuration steering boards at least annually—I think in many cases, early on, it should be more often—where the senior requirements person for the service and the senior acquisition person sit down together to look at requirements adjustments that need to be made in response to reality, in response to either things we’ve learned through the devel- opment program on the one hand, and on the other hand changing threats.
We also need to be designing flexibility into our programs so that we have modu- lar programs where we can do upgrades
Army AL&T Magazine April–June 2015
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