Baselining Acquisition Reform

Accumulating baseline data on the defense acquisition system is essential to gauging just how successful reform efforts have been so far. This article delineates the first step in that process. Baselining, in and of itself, or as a step in continuous process improvement, has become an accepted modern management technique. Baselining attempts to describe and capture the level of success of an existing system, before proposed system changes are applied to the existing system. The changed system should show a large enough increase in success over the existing system to warrant the cost and other expenses of implementation. The Department of Defense (DoD) Acquisition Reform (AR) Program is a series of changes being incorporated into the DoD acquisition system. This article is an ex post facto attempt to baseline the DoD acquisition system prior to the introduction of reforms. To do that, one has to determine the effective date of the changes and the level of success of the then-existing DoD acquisition system. Data are available to allow one to do just that. The main point of this article is to identify and describe the first step in a three-step process called benchmarking, baselining, or a part of continuous process improvement. Step 1 is to identify a process, procedure, or product into which a series of changes or improvements are to be incorporated. Describe the current process, procedure or product as carefully as possible as regards its current effectiveness and efficiency. Establish a date for this baseline of the existing system. Step 2 is to introduce the changes or improvements into the process, procedure or product. Step 3 is to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the changed system, at some future date. The appendix presents a review of Defense Acquisition Pilot Programs (DAPPs).
Published in Acquisition Review Quarterly, p33-45, Winter 2000.