[2] The Effect of the Three Policies

In the previous article I discussed the three policies that constitute business as usual for defense contractors. The policies are:

1) The most important measurement for all managers and all resources is the number of overhead hours accumulated by individuals, groups, and departments. This measurement is to be minimized at all times, or jobs are lost.

2) The number of active projects is determined not by the capacity of the organization but by the number of successful proposals, which almost always exceeds the capacity of the organization.

3) All active projects must demonstrate progress continuously.

Now I want to describe how these policies do their damage.

From the perspective of the Department of Homeland Security, the best situation would exist if the development projects performed by defense contractors were completed as fast as possible, always. This would deliver the greatest number of defense systems to the Department, in the earliest practicable time.

In order for maximum speed to be achieved and sustained by a multiproject operation, like those of the defense contractors, two conditions must exist. First, every developer must know which of several tasks in the developer's in-box should be completed first. After identifying the most urgent task among all the tasks in his/her in-box, every developer must perform that task at a full level of effort and without unnecessary interruptions. The policies listed above prevent these two necessary conditions for speed from being achieved.

The first policy forces resources to stay busy at all times, so that their "overhead" measurement can be maintained at or very close to zero. Keeping busy is a very easy thing to do, if one stops trying to perform the right task and simply takes on any available task. Keeping busy is even easier to do when the second policy is at work, since the second policy guarantees that there is always too much work in process within the organization. Thus, the first two policies create the stage for the complete destruction of task-level prioritization and speed of project execution.

The destruction of task-level prioritization and speed is guaranteed with the third policy: All active projects must demonstrate progress continuously. The extreme dilution of resource capacity and widespread multitasking are the only ways in which this third policy can be met by developers. The extreme dilution of resource capacity guarantees that every project sees only a small fraction of the capacity that it might otherwise utilize effectively. Thus, the duration of each project is significantly extended, unnecessarily. The widespread multitasking simply takes this dilution solution to the totally absurd extreme where even the capacity of a single individual is shared by multiple tasks and multiple projects. The effect created by these three policies, therefore, is to decrease the speed of project execution dramatically.

That speed is reduced dramatically is beyond question at this point. I have seen enough multiproject organizations, suffering the ill-effects of the three policies, to conclude that the policies and the damage that they inflict are essentially global. They are at work in every defense contractor, worldwide. And they are at work in every product development organization as well, worldwide.

The policies exist for specific reasons. These reasons are different for companies in the commercial sector than for companies in the defense industry. In the next article I will discuss why the policies exist in the defense industry. More importantly, I will discuss what the government can do to eliminate these policies and to increase by a factor of two the speed with which technology development projects are completed.