Kobren LL Best Practice F35 JSF Part Sixteen

Transcription

1 Welcome to the Defense Acquisition University. This material is for non-profit educational use only. Speaker's views and opinions are not necessarily those of the Department of Defense or DAU. Bill: Today we'll be discussing lessons learned, best practices, and innovative processes used to establish logistics, maintenance, and supportability requirements in the late '90s for what became the F-35 joint strike federal program with two individuals who played crucial roles in that process, U.S. Navy Captain retired John Boyce and Royal Navy Captain Graham Rowell. Thank you both for joining us here today. Throughout this discussion we'll use the terms F-35, Joint Strike Fighter, JSF, and Lightning-2 interchangeably noting also that the JSF program originated from what had earlier also been called the Joint Advanced Strike Technology or JAST program. Before we get started please tell us a little bit about your background and your involvement on the JSF program with particular emphasis on the requirements development. John Boyce: Well, Bill, as you said I did a number of years with JSF but before that had a 27 year navy career, a number of operational tours, organizational, intermediate wing, and then ultimately ended up in acquisition and with the specialty in materiel and logistics. The key thing for me requirements perspective I think coming to JSF is those years of operational experience really made us, specifically me, made me sensitive to the impacts of decisions made in acquisition and the resulting impact to the maintainer or operator on the flight line. So we brought that operational experience into the acquisition process, understood the implications of the decisions made early on in the program and the outcome in operations and really tried to focus that as we developed the requirements. Yeah, good morning, Bill. I'm the young guy here. I've got 37 years of naval career, and in that period I worked at both acquisition and in operational logistics, a number of squadrons over the years, fixed wing and rotary wing; and actually worked on JSF three times and am still currently working as a support contractor, CSS, in the program office. The first time I came over in '96 when we were really starting to work the requirements document and I was part of the requirements team. I'm sure we'll talk about that later. I came back about 2004 where we were establishing a strategy for the sustainment phase, how do we implement the requirements and the products into full life cycle sustainment? I retired last year from the military and now I'm supporting the program office and really the implementation phase which is one of the more difficult phases. 1

2 Bill: Great. Performance-based logistics was a key fundamental component of the support strategy for this weapon system. Could you care to elaborate on the benefits and the long-range planning that gendered for the JSF program? Yeah. I mean, again, that's quite a hard question. There are a lot of people out there today saying, "Does PBL already work," and they quote different programs. The one thing I've done over many years is -- and having run PBL programs in the U.K. and trying to get them moving here, PBLs come in many different forms. Some are good. Some are bad. A lot of the principles we spoke about through the generation of the initial requirements really we've used now in the JSF PBL approach. But there are a lot of people out there saying, "PBL is not a good thing. It hasn't produced the cost savings. Okay, it improves capability but it's yet to be demonstrated that it's successful." My experience says that there are a lot of fundamental principles to PBL. It's not just about contracting for outcomes, identify the metrics, tracking the metrics, incentivising right behavior. All those things are difficult and really you've got to look at the particular platform and apply the right things at the right time to create the behaviors and incentivization you need, but it's also about the teaming, teaming with industry. I'm quite a big lien advocate, and I think you've got to remove a lot of waste. Why are PBLs more successful on a legacy approach? Well, one is because we communicate and we don't do a lot of things that we don't need to do or duplicate things. I actually think the government in a lot of cases makes industries as bad as they are, if I can use that here, because the things we impose on industry drive the wrong behavior. So it's really changing all that, as well as taking waste out, as well as working together and getting the communication together. So PBL, although it's still from a platform level which we're applying on JSF is unproven, I believe must be a success because it's got to be better than the way we do business today on a lot of [inaudible] platforms. John Boyce: I think a key thing to PBL, and as you say, in some discussions it's actually picked up a negative connotation because either JAO said you're not seeing the cash savings that were originally advertised or people think that the services have abdicated responsibility and their role. But it's fundamentally about shared risk and shared reward and as you said, motivating and incentivising the correct behaviors, which traditionally there's no risk to the contractor for him or her to sell a component to the service when they need it. Tell me what you want. I'll give you the lead time. I'll give you a price. Off you go. Great. 2

3 We want the contractor, we want industry to be a member of the team, to understand and work towards that same outcome and be focused and motivated to seeing those aircraft fly the same way that guy on the flight line, the guy in the cockpit, or the program manager putting everything in place to execute wants to see it fly. You need to be part of the team. So PBL brings everybody inside the fence to the extent that contractually or legally you can, but it brings you all inside the fence. The U.K. is actually ahead of the U.S. in my view on advancing the PBL concept and turning it from a concept into reality for specific programs, and I'll name a couple, but the reason they went there is the U.K. ran out of money before the U.S. did in the military. It's a forcing function. I don't think we would have ever been talking PBL if we had an unlimited budget. We probably would still be maintaining the organic force structure as it existed after World War II and after Vietnam and whatever the case may be, but we can't afford to do business the way we've done it before. We also can't afford to fail. So we talk a lot about best business practices and PBL and bringing industry in and how are things done out there, but we need to understand it needs to be applied and tailored to a war fighting environment. True to that, and BPL can be whatever you want it to be to specifically support your program if you maintain the philosophy of shared risk, shared reward, all one team. I mean, pick a program. Today we're talking JSF. Everybody's got JSF on their breastplate, if you will. It should be immaterial whether it says Nav-Air or ASC or Lockheed or BAE on the shoulder patch. You're all one team, irrespective of where you came from. You got to be motivated that way. So I think that's a fundamental key to PBL that really makes it successful. Now, the programs I was going to refer to in the U.K., SKIOS and IMOS. IOS stands for Integrated Operational Support, and there were two helicopter programs that are really -- and there was a lot of discussion and exchange between the U.K. and the U.S. for at least the last decade that you and I participated in when we were in uniform, and it's interesting to see it now being materialized in these two programs where AgustaWestland and Lockheed have taken on responsibility for complete platform availability of the Merlin helicopter and so, I mean, the squadron flies it. The squadron still does their fewer level things, but even then the contractor has assumed some of that risk for their performance. So they're there to make sure they have the right training. They're there to make sure they have the necessary components or support equipment because at the end of the day the contractor structured that around their -- not availability but performance and how many aircraft did they have available and how 3

4 many did they actually fly. So platform availability is where you want to go with JSFs. Certainly some programs I'm involved with today in the U.S, we're trying to get there. I'm not aware -- if you talk about whether the 117 made it there or not, discussion we can have on the side sometime. Certainly C-17 from a depot perspective. F-18 is doing some of that, but I'm not aware where across the board tip the tale we've really taken that on board in the U.S. yet. So IMOS is relatively early. Been about a year and a half to two years now working. SKIOS which I just reviewed again a couple weeks ago when I was over there, which is a Sea King support, and they've got the contractors, both the prime and the subcontractors sitting there with the equivalent of their systems command personnel, their government personnel, and some war fighter reps, and they monitor from the flight line and what's happening on a day to day basis all the way back to what they call depth maintenance or depot level maintenance for us and coordinate everything and move stuff around. They're looking -- I have it over here. That operational unit doesn't necessarily need it today. I can move it over here, and they work that in concert with the service to give the best operational availability and the best platform support across the entire fleet of those Sea Kings that have been operating in the U.K. So it's great to see it working. They had a common culture. They have a lot of trust. They realize everything can't be captured to the nth degree in a contract, and they work the things that need to be worked irrespective of that. I'd like to see us go there. Certainly I'm looking forward to when JSF is filled and operating in that fashion. Two things I'd add. One is there's a big fear around -- I think there's a big misunderstanding. A lot of people see PBL as outsourcing, just handing everything over to industry; you can do it better than we can. Well, that's not PBL in my mind. PBL, respect; about partnering and teamworking. You know, the contractor is going to work to whatever is on contract. If you got the right relationship, there will be a give and take there, but fundamentally his responsibility is about delivering to whatever you've contracted for. I mean, we're discussing now what is the role of the product support integrator? Should that be a government responsibility? Certainly the feel is the PSI role will come back to government. To me the government has always had that role in the total life cycle systems manager. The PEO JSF is responsible for the platform, not just through the SDD phase but all the way through OT and test and then into the sustaining phase. It's a life cycle responsibility. It's not an industry responsibility. The PEO, the JPER has that accountability to the war 4

5 fighter to deliver the outcome. He will use industry a great deal more than we used him in the past under a lot of PBL approaches, and I think that's good and as long as it's done with an understanding of what's happening. One of the big issues, and this is the second point, is a lot of the cost savings apart from taking waste out and the other things is about reducing infrastructure. I mean, the U.S. have an awful lot of infrastructure and people doing stuff the way we've been doing our legacy platforms. Some of that infrastructure has got to go. It's got to be challenged if indeed savings have to be made. If the services decide that they want to keep that infrastructure or the OSD decides they want to keep that infrastructure, that's fine. I mean, that needs to be one of the ground rules in the beginning, but people have got to be prepared to reduce infrastructure to drive the cost out. You can't sustain a legacy infrastructure and get the sort of savings we've been talking about. In U.K. we've removed vast duplication in organic depot. We've collapsed forward in a lot of the fighter aircraft programs. We've removed two or three layers of maintenance. And the savings are between 30 and 50 percent over the legacy. Some people say, "Wow, you were really that bad at the beginning," and we were. It was really fat and inefficient and a lot of duplication. There are amazing savings to be made if people are really up to take those savings, but you need that top level leadership to drive it through. This has been a production of the Defense Acquisition University, where people come to learn, perform, succeed. 5