LEADING THE CHARGE
Dr. Jacques Gansler, vice president emeritus at the University of Maryland and former USD(AT&L), discusses best collaborative practices and success stories during the Department of the Navy SBIR/STTR Primes Summit in December 2015 at the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Virginia. Gansler, who led a landmark acquisition reform study in 2007, continues to decry the tangle of regulation governing defense acquisition, much of it implemented in response to unforeseen events. (U.S. Navy photo by John F. Williams)
“Te Defense Acquisition University has made good progress in recent years improving the training of acquisition managers, but there is more work to be done,” Fox said. “… Tere needs to more careful selection of program manag- ers and other key managers to weed out those who have phobias
for obtaining
and working with quantitative data. … If an acquisition manager of a large engi- neering development program does not have a strong academic background in science, engineering, mathematics and possibly business administration, the manager is likely to be in over his or her head to begin with. Not everyone can be an effective manager of large engineering development programs.”
Speaking June 16 at the third Army Innovation Summit in Williamsburg, Virginia, the Hon. Frank Kendall, under- secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics (USD(AT&L)), said that engineers should be managing engineers, just as physicians should man- age physicians and lawyers be in charge of lawyers. Unlike the other services, the Army has a real problem establish- ing this degree of expertise, Kendall said, with only one-third of Army engineering program managers having expertise in engineering.
“If you’re supervising engineers, it’s really helpful to have an engineering degree. … I think you guys need to take a look at that, [and] frankly, Katrina, I think you
need to do better there. Te other ser- vices do not have that situation.
“Tere is a world of difference—and I’ve seen this a hundred times, a thousand times—between a program that is led by somebody who understands the design and the issues related to the design and the risks and what’s needed to address those risks, [and] somebody who doesn’t. … Industry will always put a good face on things, and you’ve got to understand what’s really going on,” Kendall said. (For more on Kendall’s views on acquisition reform, see “Tink, Execute, Improve,” Page 112.)
Creating effective program managers will require more than 15 or 20 weeks of
1976 Office of Management Budget Circular A-109
• Addressed acquisition reform and reduc- ing cost overruns in executive branch agencies.
1981 Carlucci Initiatives
• Responded to 1980s horror headlines: $435 hammers, $640 toilet seats, $7,600 coffee makers.
• Recommended steps to improve and stabi- lize the weapons acquisition process.
• Increased use of multiyear funding to gain more efficient production rates.
1982 Nunn-McCurdy Act
• Designed to curtail cost growth in Ameri- can weapon procurement programs.
• Increased oversight of programs exceed- ing baseline cost estimates by more than 15 percent.
ASC.ARMY.MIL
21
ACQUISITION
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