What Leadership Approaches, Organizational Structures, and Contracting Methods Enable Speed to Award in the Army

Abstract

America's National Defense Strategy sets forth building a more lethal force and reforming the business practices of the Department of Defense for greater performance and affordability (Mattis, 2018). Additionally, the 2019 Army research topics published by ASA(ALT) DACM office included a review of the Army's contract award process to discover ways to streamline and improve speed in contract award (Colson, 2018). Prior research on organizational structure, leadership literature, and contracting methods offer a research baseline to provide the Army with an examination of the question: What contracting methods, organizational structure, and leadership approaches enable speed to award in the Army? The methodology applied to this research topic was an examination of peer reviewed articles and books on leadership theory, organization structure, and contracting methods. A qualitative literature review methodology was used for this research. This paper explores the federal government contracting process using a systems approach to discover relationships that enable speed in reaching contracting award. Acknowledging that contract award is not the end game with testing and fielding also required, seeking efficiencies in the contracting process remains a worthy pursuit. Recommendations from this analysis provide several avenues to explore with the goal of creating a faster contracting process where a variety of perspectives, highlighted techniques, and enabling methods may increase speed in awarding U.S. Army contracts. , In view of the current world situation with near peer adversaries attempting to field technology more rapidly drives a renewed interest in U.S. ability to field at a faster rate. Additionally with the newly formed 4-star command, U.S. Army Futures Command, faster approaches might be useful in updating acquisition processes. Further exploration and discussion of this research topic may generate new approaches.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 14, 2019
Accession Number
AD1074267

Entities

People

  • Patrick O'farrell

Organizations

  • Defense Acquisition University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Biomedical
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Human Systems
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Army Procurement
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Business Administration
  • Contracts
  • Department Of Defense
  • Governments
  • Management Personnel
  • Military Acquisition
  • Military Research
  • National Security
  • Organizational Structure
  • Procurement
  • Psychology
  • Public Administration
  • United States
  • United States Government

Readers

  • Government Contracting/Procurement.
  • Strategic Security Studies
  • Systems Analysis and Design