Enabling Effective Teams
Through the Use of
Integrated Data Environments
Ms. Nancy A. Moulton, PMP
Project Manager's Office, Strategic and Theater Command and Control Systems
Abstract
How many of us today are members of some type of Integrated Product Team (IPT)? How many of us are members of more than one? How many of us feel we are over loaded with the administrative burden that keeping all member informed places on us? How many of us wish our IPT could operate more effectively? Peter Drucker said that effectiveness is the foundation for success. He also said effectiveness is doing the right things. Leadership has also been defined as doing the right things. In this paper, I will present my ideas on how integrated data environments can be coupled with teamwork and used to do the right things to enable the teams we participate in to become more effective.
1. Characteristics of an IDE
As with every new concept in government, it seems different people define the same term different ways. IDE is no exception. Therefore, to clarify what the IDE looks like, I've included the following list of characteristics and examples to enable us to gain a common understanding.
· Shared information: create once, maintain at the source, use throughout the life-cycle
· All stakeholders have access to data at the right time and place
· Greater IPT efficiency is enabled through work flow, on demand data is accessed through a common operating environment
· Automated configuration management process is integrated with acquisition and sustainment community data requirements
· Data management system ensures timely, accurate control
· Single work station access to distributed data
· Delivery-in-Place method for CDRL data
· Policies exist and are followed concerning how to treat data as corporate assets, integrate it and maintain it
In this kind of environment information is created electronically, and is no longer printed out for signature. No longer sending hard copy only to be received and re-entered once again into the recipients computer system. For those of you who use email systems extensively, you would no longer send attachments to lists of people, constrained by bandwidth and sometimes bringing down the server that receives multiple copies of the same huge file. Distribution of data is eliminated, providing access to the data as soon as it is available to all parties at once with an access time of seconds instead of days or weeks, without incurring any transportation costs or printing costs. Instead of endless email tennis matches, where we bounce messages back and forth until someone decides to take action, a work flow tool is provided to more effectively send the task to action officers, based on the process and task descriptions assigned. All data and tools needed for research and resolution of the problem are immediately available to the user on the user's desktop. IDE eliminates the need for special terminals used to get into each database, sometimes located in special rooms in far away buildings. For product data, configuration management is central to and integrated with operations of both acquisition and sustainment communities. The data management system ensures integrity of data and control, to ensure the right information gets to the right person at the right time. IDE enables delivery-in-place as described in the DoD 5000 series directives, for delivering contract data to the government. This environment can reduce CDRLs almost entirely. In the IDE project implemented by the Project Manager for Combat Mobility Systems (PM CMS), the number of CDRLs went from over 230 to 18 across four major contracts. That's a 92% improvement! The data was provided through working relationships in the IPTs and shared via the Delivery In Place (DIP) server, so CDRLs were no longer needed. However, an IDE will not help a poorly run organization if it continues to be poorly run. Policies must be established and enforced to ensure teams are doing the right things to use the IDE effectively. Processes should not be merely automated, they should be innovated to take advantage of the power of the new environment and tools is offers.
2. Current Status of Defense System Data
Much of the data in defense systems today is not available in a timely manner. It is either walking around in someone's head, forgotten about in a file somewhere, or locked on someone's hard drive. Corporate knowledge is often tied to individuals. Is is not is frustrating to be the one on Friday afternoon who has to respond to a budget "what if" drill when everyone else is off who would have had that last information paper that was submitted on their computer? Now you have to come up with something up in a hurry and hope it does not contradict what your team submitted last time. It would be great to have a library of information that can easily be searched to find all the budget related documents that were ever written on your program? IDE can provide such off the shelf tools to enable teams to share information more effectively, so that you can find it when you need it. Today data structures inhibit sharing of information and valuable data. Even when PM CMS standardized on one office software package for routine correspondence, different versions made it difficult. The life span of data is too short today. Many of our processes repeat themselves over and over. People want the same information over and over, maybe with a slightly different twist. The mountains of data created early in product life-cycles is somehow lost when the next crew cannot find the digital copy and it must be re-created. In the past, we have created boundaries and built walls that inhibit information sharing. Today through the use of IPTs we have seen some progress in removing the organizational barriers that exist, however, we must ensure the information system architecture also accommodates an open flow of information across those boundaries. In addition, you would be amazed at how different each person's perspective is pertaining to how a process is accomplished. Often very few, if any understand the whole process. Those that thought they did, find that what is actually happening is not even close to what they thought was happening.
3. Information sharing enables teams to work better
In an IPT environment the IPT has proponency for the CDRL data that is delivered. In an IDE the distribution, administration and feedback on that data is greatly simplified. The data is placed on the server, the workflow is launched to team members asking them to comment on it, and the data is available through a folder that appears on each team member's desktop. Delivery-in-place eliminates hours of duplication and distribution that is done in a paper world. If you operate in an email world, it eliminates the need for multiple messages, overcomes the difficulty with sending large files over the Internet and through email systems, and prevents the potential for email system failure or significant degradation in performance when sending large attachments to several people on the same server all at once. The folder that now appears on the desktop may contain a read-only master copy and a copy for editing, for example. Using off the shelf standard commercial software tools comments from each member are added to the copy for editing. All comments appear in a single document and all team members can see everyone else's comments. Once everyone agrees on the final edit, the document becomes the approved version and supersedes the previous. Oh, if you are wondering how you clean up the mess of mark ups from everyone who has left comments, one click of the mouse reformats the document and removes all the text marked for deletion. These tools offer many options and can be employed many different ways. The key here is to use integrated off-the-shelf capability to enhance team performance, not to degrade it. Some other ways the IDE can improve collaborative productivity are listed below.
· Share more information to ensure the best-informed decisions can be made by the team or enables them to use a consistent decision baseline. This is key to empowering the team to take action.
· Provide greater understanding and visibility into the process, eliminate "black holes" and "wait states."
· Maintain life-cycle consistency, decision traceability, corporate memory, and buy/maintain only the information that is needed.
4. Information Sharing Outcomes
Using an IDE enhances both individual and team performance by reducing cycle times for actions to be accomplished, reduces uncertainty, enhances understanding, increases decision options, reduces downstream discrepancies, supports a task or product driven organizational structure, enables process innovations and is flexible enough to respond quickly to the ever changing business environment in which we operate.
Some additional benefits that the IDE has demonstrated are listed below.
· Enables acquisition reform initiatives
· Facilitates Electronic Delivery of Data
· Enhances IPT communication
· Provides coordination of product information
· Makes program documents/briefings available, reducing requests for information
· Ensures all team members use the current revision, reducing errors
· Enables parallel processes, more concurrent engineering and acquisition streamlining
· Eliminates lag time between drawing approval and distribution
5. Return on Investment
Enterprises that join in partnership to form and use an integrated data environment (IDE) should baseline the following metrics prior to implementation and can expect great improvement in these areas as a result of an effective implementation.
· Reduced cost of development, acquisition and support of weapon systems
· Reduced cycle times for system development, production and development of support
· Improved quality of systems and system support through sharing of current and accurate data
· Improved weapon system life-cycle management processes
Through reading the Coopers and Lybrand study on IDE implementations, 1996 and the book "Process Innovation" by Davenport. I have observed the following statistics. Typically when a company implements an improved team work approach alone the results range from 10 to 50 percent improvement. However, when you combine team empowerment with the power of the IDE as the force multiplier and innovate the processes instead of improving them, the result is anywhere from 50 to 90 percent improvement in most cases. The variation in the ranges seems to come down to how effective the leadership was in implementing the overall strategy.
6. Summary
DoD and industry now have experience and guidance available to assist leaders wanting to implement IDE. DoD information can be found at http:\\www.acq.osd.mil/cals, which has links to other sites with additional information. Of particular interest may be an IDE Handbook that is available on the Web and on the Acquisition Deskbook CD ROM. Two other good sources of information are "Process Innovation" by Davenport, which describes the risks involved in innovating, many success stories as well as failures and outlines what to expect. And most significantly for me is the book by John Kotter and Harvard Business Press titled "Leading Change." Leading Change is an excellent culmination learned into a of "best practice" guide. The process for leading lasting change outlined in his book held true for me when I, together with Jack Paul, implemented the first IDE for the Army, which we affectionately called the "Paperless PM." The book also serves as an outstanding desk reference.
In closing, I'll leave you with a quote from Albert Einstein "The significant problems we face cannot be solved from the same level we were at when we created them." Operating in an IDE involves thinking differently about how teams can do business to create less burden and greater results.
IDE + Team work = High Performance
Ms. Nancy A. Moulton has over twenty years of logistics, acquisition, and project management experience with the Army. She is currently Chief of the Training, MANPRINT, Fielding and Support Branch of PM STCCS. She has recently served as IDE Project Manager for OSD and prior to that led the IDE effort for PM CMS. Ms. Moulton will earn her Masters Degree in Systems Management with a focus on Information Technology in Oct 97 and has been board selected as the Project Manager for Light Tactical Vehicles. She will be transitioning to PM LTV in the spring of 1998.
