By Ann Roosevelt
The integrated team that links the Army and industry has led to the Future Combat Systems’ (FCS) program ability to manage the program that consists of sensors, robotics, vehicles, weapons and a network to tie it all to soldiers, officials said.
“Probably the single most important benefit you get from the integrated team is the speed of decision making,” Daniel Zannini, FCS deputy program director and a senior vice president at SAIC [SAI], said in a recent interview. “Historically as a user, I passed the requirements off and it wouldn’t be until months or years later that I knew if I was going to get the product that met the requirements–when they came back over the fence from the acquisition community.”
The integrated team of users, acquisition and industry personnel make decisions every day. “The decision cycle and the speed of decision making I think are key,” Zannini said.
The FCS program is managed as a unit, not as a series of single platforms. Some 600 industry partners are linked to other Defense Department and government entities in one integrated team that is managed for the Army by Boeing [BA] and SAIC as lead system integrator (LSI).
Dennis Muilenburg, vice president-general manager, Boeing Combat Systems and FCS program manager, said management harvests best practices. “Some of the things we’ve clearly learned from FCS are: the partnership model that we developed with the Army, to operate with pace; to have very clear lines of communications–and it all helps us resolve development [issues] quickly and keep up the high pace.”
Also of note is the focus on system engineering and the tools to integrate what normally would have been separate systems, he said.
Another area is how the industry team was built, “the one team partnership model, where we went out and got the best of industry instead of a team of select partners,” Muilenburg said.
Daily management has led to some battle rhythm concepts built around the program in terms of how it’s managed day to day, he said.
“Things like weekly earned value system that allows us to get an in-depth understanding of cost and schedule all the way down into the supply base every week,” Muilenburg said. “A risk management system that allows us to get insight on a weekly basis. Really stepping up the battle rhythm so that we get visibility–daily and weekly visibility–that in the past might have been more like monthly visibility. And with visibility comes pace of operations, quick resolution of issues, and really allows us to execute effectively to cost schedule and performance.”
A team actively captures lessons as the program moves along. The management model is constantly fine-tuned, as lessons are rolled into the program on a continuous improvement cycle, he said.
Maj. Gen. Charles Cartwright, Army program manager FCS (Brigade Combat Team), said since FCS is being built as a unit what’s he’s learning can’t really be compared to single- platform program management.
The Army has learned the value of the FCS System of Systems Integration Laboratory (SoSIL) to integrate and test applications as they mature, he said. This includes testing applications like fires, maneuver, intelligence and even the joint piece, by integrating, and testing and having soldiers using applications in the SoSIL.
“Right now, the Army Training and Doctrine Command [TRADOC] and the acquisition community are taking 67 programs across the [program executive offices] PEOs to help us get ready for preliminary design review of those complementary programs, [all the unit things like] JTRS, WIN-T, how many field trucks do I have, the ammo, Excalibur, MRM,” Cartwright said.
“We’re doing a complete requirements scrub to make sure they match what FCS has got to do, and we’re doing it on the acquisition side–what’s the requirements schedule and doing that synchronization,” he said.
Looking at the Brigade Combat Team, Cartwright said he’s working to synchronize systems within a unit, building a unit over time, compared to having a single requirements document, single acquisition schedule and a single budget.
As a result of the integrated program management process and lessons learned, FCS has consistently met cost, schedule and performance goals, senior program officials have said repeatedly since the start of the System Development and Demonstration phase in 2003.