Government Leader home > August 2005 issue
August 2005; Vol. 1 No. 3
Partnership Imperative: A Badgeless Workforce: GCSS-Army’s team approach defines a partnership—and defies the odds
By Sami Lais
Other stories on the Partnership Imperative are:
The Army’s Global Combat Support System project is the type that routinely has a 75 percent failure rate. But the GCSS project is on time, on budget and within scope. Moreover, the government, consultancy, vendor and system integrator employees involved in the program are not only still on speaking terms, they’re planning their first cook-out together.
What’s their secret?
“Argue in private and never go to bed angry,” said Steven Marshman, GCSS-Army project leader for Northrop Grumman Corp., the systems integrator.
GCSS-Army is the largest enterprise resource planning implementation in the Defense Department’s history. Once a new ERP system from SAP AG of Walldorf, Germany, is deployed, it will link information on all of the service’s assets, supplies and equipment from “factory to foxhole” and make it accessible to 135,000 soldiers, civilians and contractors worldwide.
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| | To be successful in teaming, you have to work to build relationships, build the skill sets you’ll need and do it without worrying about where it’s coming from. —GCSS-Army program manager Lt. Col. Robert Zoppa | |
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It may seem an unlikely environment for orange blossoms. But many of the guiding principles for a good marriage apply to successful teaming, said Lt. Col. Robert Zoppa, GCSS-Army program manager. And take at least as much work to maintain.
“To be successful in teaming, you have to work to build relationships, build the skill sets you’ll need and do it without worrying about where it’s coming from,” Zoppa said.
Marshman described the program’s team as a badgeless workforce.
“I mean that when you come through the door I don’t want to care what company or what part of the government you work for,” he said.
This is no mere lip service.
Northrop Grumman agreed to the Army’s stipulation that it bid the project on a fixed-price basis, phase by phase. In addition, SAP AG wanted representatives in key positions at Northrop Grumman for the life of the implementation, a request Marshman called a bit unusual. Northrop Grumman agreed, if SAP would send those representatives to work onsite, he said.
Building for success
Joining Northrop Grumman, SAP and Army subject experts from numerous commands are consultants from IBM Global Services, whose job it is to guide the overall implementation.
Having all members of the team working together in the same building is crucial for success, said Gary Schuller, GCSS-Army deputy program manager.
“A lot of people think the teaming can be virtual, but it doesn’t work as well as when you’re seeing each other every day face to face,” he said.
“The way DOD contracts usually work is you have a meeting to discuss what you’re going to do, then you go off and work on it,” Marshman said. “Then there’s a government review of what you’ve done so far, and then it starts all over again. It’s an iterative process, but you don’t really have much contact between reviews. For this project, everyone is in the same building.”
Marshman has worked on public and private-sector ERP implementations before. Government is more difficult because of the decision-making process, he said.
“The commercial-sector official has a board and stockholders to answer to, but a government official has to answer to a whole different set of authorities, especially in DOD,” he said. For this project, they knew they had to craft a collaboration.
“So we sat down together at the beginning to decide how we’d run the project,” he said. “We all agreed that we had to put everything into the pot and decide who had the best training and experience for each aspect of the project and give the jobs out based on who had the best qualifications, no matter where they were from.”
“The mission of trying to team is complex,” Zoppa added. “A lot of the credit needs to be given to the contractor side.”
As they talk, the three men finish one another’s sentences, each builds on what the other says and the good will is palpable. The approbation is not limited to team members: GCSS-Army was a finalist in the 2005 American Council for Technology Intergovernmental Solutions Awards.
It’s tempting to think that if only you put together the right team of men and women of the right spirit, you too could enjoy such a partnership.
More than trust
Undoubtedly, a willingness to trust in your team is a key component in such a partnership, and GCSS and Northrop Grumman, as well as IBM, SAP and the multitude of subcontractors have put in the effort to build and sustain it.
But in a survey of 34 large enterprises that had tackled ERP implementations, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology found that although two-thirds of the respondents viewed their ERP systems as their organizations’ most strategic computing platform, three-quarters of the ERP projects were judged unsuccessful by the ERP implementers.
Are we to suppose a lack of good will alone sank those projects? Or is it more likely that, unlike GCSS-Army managers, those organizations failed to adequately set the stage for success? Before mounting their campaign, GCSS-Army program managers, like any good military commanders, first softened the field, in this case by eliminating opportunities for failure.
GCSS-Army managers pored over best practices and lessons learned from public and private-sector enterprises. With the help of Northop Grumman officials, they waded through the confusion and evaluated more than 30 ERP systems before selecting SAP, which was already in development with the German army on a defense-oriented version of its ERP software.
The selection was crucial, Schuller said. “There are key ways that the Army is different from a commercial organization, and the SAP defense-related program takes that into consideration,” he said. “One example is that whereas in a commercial organization, there’s a [plant or other entity] that’s being supplied, in the Army, it’s the [warfighters] that are being supplied, and they don’t stay in one place.”
“As we have gone through the process, we have kept open communications with the Bundeswehr [which comprises the German armed forces and corresponding civil administration] team in Germany,” Zoppa said. “We have continued to talk with them and see how they’re doing things and leverage off what they’re doing.”
Before the planning began, GCSS-Army managers also amassed the more than 5,700 formal requirements the program must meet.
In 2002 GCSS-Army officials brought in PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP to help guide the implementation. They also brought the team together for 300 SAP workshops to examine—and in some cases re-engineer—its business processes and map them to SAP processes.
“The SAP methodology makes the teams work out in great detail the business processes they want to implement,” Marshman said. “Our role is to expose any technology issues that will arise in implementing those processes.”
And by tasking everyone to stay close to the SAP structure, which “typically reflects industry best practices, we’ll have those best practices built into our blueprint,” Zopppa said.
By getting Northrop Grumman to agree to bid the project phase by phase, GCSS-Army officials were able to divide the job into manageable chunks.
The clearing of obstacles and the program structure that GCSS-Army managers provided helped create an environment in which to foster the public-private partnership.
“We do fuss at one another occasionally, and we don’t always agree on everything,” Marshman said. “But we work it out.”
And there’s a flip side to the team approach that GCSS-Army and Northrop Grumman have forged.
“In a traditional setup, there’s nobody else but me to do a job,” Marshman said. “This way, if there are things I can’t do, or if I need relief, there’s always someone to call on.”
Other stories on the Partnership Imperative are:
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