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Government Leader home > March 2005 issue
March 2005; Vol. 1 No. 1
WAVE MANAGEMENT
By STEPHEN BARR
How to keep programs afloat during budget storms: This Navy exec makes her crew a priority.
Like many federal executives, Allison F. Stiller spends a lot
of each day solving puzzles.
How do you structure a contract for the best deal? How
do you turn cost projections into a budget? How do you
wrap up a project on time—when some can take as long
as seven years to complete?
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| | “I have to trust the program managers.” — The Navy’s Allison F. Stiller |
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Stiller, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for ship programs, is
responsible for about $10 billion annually in ship construction
and acquisition. It’s a job that seems certain to get harder rather
than easier.
“The hours are long, and I don’t think they are self-generated, I’ll put
it that way,” she says with a chuckle, holding a multipage spreadsheet
showing the status of about 10 Navy ship
construction programs under way or in
the planning stages.
The budget deficit and the costs of the
Iraq war seem certain to force the
White House and Congress to scale
back naval ship construction and, perhaps,
the size of the fleet. Stiller, who
has mastered the art and science of
building the next generation of ships,
such as the DD(X) destroyer, may next
have to master the art and science of
slowing ship construction and helping
the nation’s shipyards ride out a budget
storm.
It’s a challenge that many government
leaders will face—keeping what Stiller
calls “our core competency” if budgets decline. “It’s a different puzzle,”
Stiller says, “but a puzzle.”
During a conversation over the conference table in her Pentagon
office, Stiller, 41, outlined a civil service career in the Navy that has
given her opportunities to work at a Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard and
on Capitol Hill. She calls it a career of “jigs and jags” that have helped
shape her management tenets. They include:
Mentor and be mentored. Her first supervisor was supportive
and always looking for new opportunities for his staff, whether promotions
or lateral transfers. It’s a style she has tried to emulate, she
says. “If I find a real good superstar, I try to make sure they go and
get other exposure and that they move forward.”
She adds, “I think the more mentors you bring along, the better off
you are; you get different perspectives from people.”
Go for the big picture. Hired in 1989—the last big wave of recruiting
in the acquisition workforce—Stiller made her breakthrough
in 1994, when she joined a rotational program that helped her “see the
rest of the Navy.” She was given short-term assignments in high-level
Defense Department offices, in the office of a senator, at the Maritime
Administration and elsewhere. She adds, “Breaking out of your comfort
zone is important. It is important to get new challenges.”
Foster trust and look for trends. Any executive faces “a lot of
moving parts,” Stiller says. “I have to trust the program managers to
understand day to day what they are seeing and cost-reporting.”
It’s also important to be on the lookout for problems. “If I see an issue
on one program, I can talk to all the others
to see if the are facing the same issue,
or if they have faced it and come up with
a solution. So there are lessons learned
that we can share across programs.”
Seek and give feedback. Stiller,
who once supervised 85 employees as a
deputy program manager, believes
“people want to know, ‘How I am
doing, and what I can improve on?’ ”
Employees deserve feedback more
often than once a year, she says. The
Pentagon is launching a new pay and
personnel system this summer—a possible
model for other agencies—and
Stiller’s office will be included in the first
phase. It should help managers “to really
understand what your employees are doing and how they contribute
to the success of the organization,” she says.
Enjoy the work. Stiller, who joined the Senior Executive Service
last year, says she finds her job fascinating. “It’s the complexity of
what we are building—a war machine—and it’s got to function and
it’s got to do a lot of different things.”
At the end of a long day, she says, “It is rewarding to know that you
are putting product out there that defends the country and that you
are equipping the sailors and Marines with the best you can, while
being very conscious of the taxpayer dollars.”
Stephen Barr writes the Federal Diary column at The
Washington Post. He also hosts an online discussion, “Federal
Diary Live,” each week at www.washingtonpost.com.
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