Frank Camm

Performance-based accountability systems (PBASs) link incentives to measured performance to improve services to the public. Research suggests that PBASs influence provider behaviors, but little is known about PBAS effectiveness at achieving performance goals. This study examines nine PBASs that are drawn from five sectors: child care, education, health care, public health emergency preparedness, and transportation.

The government, as a principal, may seek to induce a private investor, as an agent, to build and operate an unconventional-oil production plant to promote early production experience with such plants. Facing significant uncertainty about the future, it also wants to limit the cost to the public of doing this. This report offers an analytic way to design and assess packages of policy instruments that the government can use to achieve its goal.

This study looked at how funding instability affects Army acquisition programs. Most funding instability was found to stem from events external to the Army or ambitious Army-set technical goals. Funding instability's effects took the form of schedule slips, cost increases, and to a lesser degree, technical compromises. No significant association was found between funding instability and the adverse effects of program cost growth and schedule slippage.

The Army must transform its institutional activities to align them with operating forces to improve support and release resources from institutional activities. This document is the executive summary for MG-530-A, What the Army Needs to Know to Align Its Operational and Institutional Activities, which provides a model for evaluating value chains to promote the alignment of needs and resources.

The Army must transform its institutional activities to align them with operating forces to improve support and release resources from institutional activities. This document provides a model for evaluating value chains to promote the alignment of needs and resources according to three representational institutional Army activities: medical services, enlisted accessioning, and short-term acquisition.

What has the Army learned about risk from its experience using contractors in the Balkans? Is the Army getting what it needs and managing risks appropriately in its combat service support contracts? This report uses the Army's Balkans Support Contract and a continuous risk-management framework to answer these questions. On the basis of this case study, the authors conclude that the Army has been getting what it needs, though it might, at times, be bearing too much cost-related risk, and that few risks arise directly from the use of contractors. They also see a need for more training for the Army's contracting personnel to better plan, coordinate, and manage contracts.

What is the best and most cost-effective way for the Army to use contractors on the battlefield? This report shows how planners can create courses of action and assess the risks associated with them to improve how the Army uses contractors on the battlefield. It shows how to assess risks relevant to mission success, contractor safety, cost, and such other factors as administrative law and force management. It addresses risk assessment relevant to decisions that affect Army use of contractors, whether they are made inside or outside the Army.

New approaches to the acquisition of services and the related policy issues in which the Office of the Secretary of Defense is likely to become involved Six case studies, representing a range of new approaches used to identify policy issues in which OSD is likely to become involved, relevant to large service acquisitions. In all cases, program management is increasingly important as day-to-day management is delegated to contractors, and alternatives to arms-length relationships are used. OSD should focus on linking services acquisition goals to strategic goals, managing congressional concerns about service acquisition, and disseminating lessons learned.

The Air Force uses the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) to fund all elements of its logistics supply chain at appropriate levels. The PPBS process has difficulty doing this well. The authors of this report propose strategic and policy changes to help the Air Force manage and fund its supply chain in an integrated manner and use closed-loop accountability systems to manage the chain, end-to-end, against its customers' goals. Implementing the changes would challenge Air Force culture, and the authors identify cultural barriers that the must be addressed.

The authors find that a large portion of Air Force depot-level costs are unrelated to flying hours, so an alternative approach to budgeting and pricing is warranted to better link budgets and prices on the one hand and activity levels in the operating commands on the other. The authors examine how Air force Material Command (AFMC) depot-level expenditures relate to operating command activity levels, i.e., flying hours. They examine the recorded expenditures of AFMC's Depot Maintenance Activity Group (DMAG) and relate Mission Design-specific DMAG repair expenditures to various lags of fleet flying hours. They find, across a variety of weapon systems, that although both flying hours and DMAG repair expenditures for component repair vary considerably month-to-month, there is no consistent, cross-system relationship between the series. The apparent lack of systematic correlation between DMAG expenditures and fleet flying hours argues for an alternative approach to budgeting and internal pricing. Specifically, these results are consistent with multi-part pricing.Under such an approach, AFMC would receive a budget to pay for its fixed costs and operating commands would no longer face prices that include DMAG fixed costs that are unrelated to demands from the operating commands. [EK]

Like many large organizations, the Department of Defense (DoD) faces a serious challenge as it attempts to balance its efforts to pursue core military, financial, and environmental goals. Over the last 15 years, DoD and other large, complex, global organizations have turned increasingly to "proactive environmental management" to balance such competing goals more successfully. By looking beyond simple compliance with environmental regulations, proactive approaches give these organizations strategic flexibility. But such approaches are difficult to implement. The authors first summarize analyses of how commercial firms have implemented proactive approaches in areas of environmental management relevant to (1) weapon system design, (2) provision of central logistics, (3) integrated base management, and (4) management of environmental cleanup, then draw implications for DoD's environmental management efforts in these areas.The authors propose an approach to implementation based on total quality management, recommending that DoD use commercially developed TQM templates, which have been customized for application to sophisticated environmental management systems, to define and monitor the details of this implementation effort.

Commercial facilities have discovered that pursuing integrated, facilitywide approaches to environmental management is good for the environment and makes good business sense. Direct benefits can include cost savings, increased operational flexibility, and improved public image. But despite the benefits, implementation can be difficult, as Department of Defense (DoD) installations have discovered while trying such integrated approaches. Commercial facilities similar to DoD installations offer insights about how to implement integrated approaches successfully. Demonstrated success factors include getting and sustaining high-level leadership support for change until change is complete, which will take time; implementing an effective environmental management system, often based on an international environmental management standard, ISO 14001, throughout the organization; establishing proactive environmental goals and activities with clear relationships to the organization's core values and mission; training and motivating personnel; using creative environmental assessment and priority setting techniques; developing good relationships with all stakeholders.The commercial lessons offered here can help DoD and other organizations implement integrated facilitywide approaches to environmental management. (PG)