Claude M. Bolton Jr., assistant secretary of the Army talks to Defense AT & L

Defense AT&L, Nov-Dec, 2004

But don't listen just to me. There are a lot of reports from veteran reporters and a lot of reports coming back from the troops themselves that extol the Stryker.

Q

You've had some experience with program terminations. Is there anything that comes to mind for the AL & T workforce in terms of lessons learned?

A

As a program executive officer in the U.S. Air Force, I was required to participate in an executive development course at DAU. During that program, I picked terminations as my project. I had looked around the Defense Department and noted that we have no process to terminate. You wake up one morning, you have no money, and someone says, "Okay, that's it!" I felt that we ought to have a bit more of a method, so I devised a one-page, three-column termination template.

The first column talks to the health of the program. I typically use a cumulative earned value that goes from that last major milestone of the program where the milestone decision authority said, "... and that's your baseline," to where you are today.

The second column deals with the politics. You go to whoever wanted the program, in the field, in the Pentagon, in the Services. You bring it to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, take it over to the Hill, to the contractors, the media, whoever was involved. That's probably the most difficult and the longest part, to soften the blow and get it just right.

The third and last column, which is extremely important, is the gray matter between the program manager's ears. We don't hire, recruit, train, promote, reward, or educate PEOs or PMs to terminate programs. There's no course at DAU and there's no process in DoD 5000 to terminate a program. What we have done--and we do it very, very well--is get a person through the DAWIA [Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act] requirements and certifications and teach PMs how to pull rabbits out of a hat. They're very good at that, even when we take the rabbits away and they have to find a new hat.

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I give the template to PEOs, not to PMs. It's not the PMs' duty: Their job is to concentrate on doing programs. I tell the PEOs, "You have a portfolio of programs here. Your job is to advise me on which of these we should press forward on and which we should terminate, based on this template."

In the Army, we have terminated some 72 programs since I walked in the door. No one's heard about most of them, except those people directly impacted, because we followed the template. On the day the president delivers his budget to the Hill, I call the affected members of Congress to tell them what is going on in this or that program, and what it means to them. In the two-and-a-half years I've been here, I've received only two letters. I wrote a note back to each explaining again what had happened, and there was no further inquiry after that.

The termination of Comanche is going along very well. Before it got to the media, we had talked to the contractors, we had talked to members of Congress, and we had talked to President Bush and the people in the Pentagon. We promised that every dollar that came out of Comanche--which is just over $14 billion--would be plowed back into aviation.