It’s this: They’re all sitting at a large table. On one side are the contractors; on the other, the government managers, like two sides eyeing each other across a combat zone.

That’s not Coker’s reality. He oversees a program supported by about 300 Computer Sciences Corp. employees.

“At our recent weekly program management review, I walked into the room and it was 50 percent support [contract] folks and 50 percent government folks,” he said. “When we were sitting around the table, it wasn’t government on one side, contractors on the other. Folks were interpersed.”

What makes the blended workforce function well for LMP officials is a set of “very disciplined, fully documented program management processes that have been communicated through the government and contractor workforce,” said Diane O’Connor, deputy project director for LMP, one of the largest business transformation projects in the world.

The Army awarded the LMP contract to CSC in 1999, and the program went live three years ago, with CSC providing the technological expertise and the Army Materiel Command bringing a deep understanding of the Army national supply-chain planning and logistics. The program manages $4.5 billion in inventory and processes transactions with 50,000 vendors.

The relationship between LMP and CSC is scrupulously rules-based, said Sheri Thureen, CSC’s program manager for LMP.

“We have all the roles, responsibilities, processes and procedures all defined and laid out,” she said.

In addition to standard government contract-management rules and regulations, LMP and CSC have added a host of other management processes to ensure a smooth working relationship. For example, “We’ve come up with a partnership agreement between the contractor and the program office to basically work as one team,” he said. “We’ve got mechanisms in place that help facilitate that.”

One of those mechanisms is a governance structure that establishes “face-offs”—or meeting environments—at every management level to resolve issues.

“Everyone understands that they work together side by side with our face-off team leaders,” O’Connor said. “As issues arise, if they can’t be worked out at their level, they are escalated [to another level]. ... The process has been valuable in terms of our ability to overcome obstacles and hurdles and meet the challenges of the program.”

While LMP managers and CSC technicians work formally as a team, there are lines of demarcation in LMP’s blended workforce. For example, Coker doesn’t evaluate the performance of contract workers.

“From my perspective, I’m evaluating the performance of the contract as a whole,” he said. “I don’t evaluate or rate specific individuals who are working in support of the prime, CSC. I set the performance metrics for the contractor to perform to.” Evaluating the performance of contract workers is up to CSC, Thureen said.

“We do [performance] evaluations on a formal basis with our employees,” she said. “That starts out with the process of establishing goals and objectives, then throughout the year we do the assessment against that.”

If a contract employee isn’t getting the job done, in the estimation of a government supervisor, the matter might be raised in joint management meetings, where the impact of the poor performance would measured against the integrated program master schedule, Thureen said.

“If we see that tasks are not being accomplished as we had planned them, that would be an indictor that we have an issue that needs to be resolved,” she said. Do CSC’s contract workers have the same sense of public service that their government counterparts have? Absolutely, said Coker. In fact, about 200 of CSC’s workers are former government logistics-systems analysts who moved over to CSC as part of the LMP initiative.

“They brought that [public service] culture along with them to this program,” Thureen said.