Program Manager Assessments: Professionalism Personified

Abstract

A few months ago, I decided to ask all of our Acquisition Category I and Major Automated Information System (MAIS)program managers (PMs) to provide me with a one- to three-page assessment of the state of their programs. At the time, this was an experiment. From the feedback I received, most PMs were delighted to have this opportunity. I have incorporated these assessments into Better Buying Power (BBP) 3.0 as an activity that will continue on an annual basis. The assessments are intended to strengthen the role of the acquisition chain of command. The assessments are simultaneously sent to me, the Service or Component acquisition executive, and the program executive officer. It was, however, an experiment that seemed to make a lot of people nervous. Some of the nervousness stemmed from concerns that I was putting the PMs in an awkward position, where they might fear that being too honest with me could jeopardize their programor get them into trouble with a senior stakeholder in the Service or on the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) staff.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 2015
Accession Number
AD1016060

Entities

People

  • Frank Kendall

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Agile Software Development
  • Best Practices
  • Command And Control
  • Contractors
  • Costs
  • Cycles
  • Department Of Defense
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Engineering
  • Life Cycles
  • Logistics
  • Software Development
  • Space Systems
  • Supply Chain
  • Systems Engineering
  • Test And Evaluation

Readers

  • Defense Acquisition Program Management
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.