Critical Path Scheduling Experience in Defense Contracts
Critical Path Scheduling Experience in Defense Contracts
Critical Path Scheduling Experience in Defense Contracts
PATH
SCHEDULING
EXPERIENCE
IN DEFENSE
CONTRACTS
Planning
and problems
of critical
path
This was 25 percent of In 1961, General Electrics defense business exceeded one billion dollars. our total sales billed. You can see why we have good reason to be more than casually acquainted with government trends in defense project management. The present trend, of course, is the use of the Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) to which you have already been introduced at this meeting. The General Electric Company has taken a lead in the use of PERT. Shortly after its introduction by the Navy in 1958, a number of our defense product departments set out to develop PERT capability even though there was no direct contractual requirement on them at the time. We have found this method to be successful in ourown planning and our continued interest in PERT has led to improvements in the system itself. We are proud of our achievements in this field but realize we are by no means alone. In fact, one of the basic problems in the industry today is the number of companies involved in the use and development of PERT. It is difficult for an outsider to fully appreciate the growth that has resulted in the field of program management technology. It puts the much publicized population explosion to shame. Since PERT was first applied to the Polaris missile, management consulting firms and operations research people have been very successful in developing more sophisticated management systems. Some form of PERT is now required on every major development contract awarded by the Department of Defense or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I have no data available for comparison at this time but I am sure that the amount of money spent on PERT related activities in the defense industry far surpasses that spent on critical path techniques in all other industry. Management of weapons system development has become a big business and the services are no longer willing to leave it to chance. Two elements have caused this tremendous upsurge. First, was the increasing need of the armed forces for control of complicated weapons system development. When we speak of a weapon system we mean the missile or equipment that directly accomplishes a mission as well as the large array of transporting equipment, checkout equipment, maintenance equipment and facilities plus the necessary tie-ins to a central defense system. The technology became so complex, covering so many fields of endeavor, that it became very difficult for a single civilian organization to cope with all of the details. At the same time, the armed forces showed an increased interest in assuming weapon system management. This situation emphasized the need for a better management method. The second element that contributed to this rapid advance was simply: the formulation of PERT provided a breakthrough in the techniques of management and control. PERT allowed all the time elements of an organized plan to be described within a framework of mathematical logic. This meant that large detailed plans could be quickly analyzed with high-speed digital computers. The extra detail promised greater cognizance and,in turn,better control. PERT was a near perfect solution to the need. When the Navy was developing Polaris, time was of utmost importance. Therefore, PERT was developed as a tool for time or schedule control only; cost was not yet a factor. Subsequent weapons systems have not been so fortunate. With the cost of these projects increasing astronomically in step with the technology, overruns in cost can have a catastrophic effect on our defense budget and ultimately, our economy. The armed forces having recognized this, worked out schemes to add the element of cost to the PERT calculation. For instance, Minuteman, Titan III and MMRBM proposal requests specified that contractors would be required to use a newer version called PERT II with a provision for cost. In the early stage of these programs, it is intended that the details of the planning and reporting system be worked out between the contractors and the contracting agency. The reason is that we are going so fast and the approaches are so new that we have not had the opportunity to standardize.
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Another reason is that these proposed management systems are very sophisticated, including reThe instruction of contractor personnel in these techniques quirements for detailed data inputs. will become a major consideration. It will no longer be possible for an individual to acquire the fundamentals of these systems by merely an hours or even a days reading of an instruction book. The picture I have intended giving you is that we are in the position of having to use management systems which are still experimental simply because the need outweighs the risks. This need of the armed services has resulted in the development of top-downapproaches to system management. This is normally what happens when a system is initiated from the top of an organization to lower echelons. It is done in this manner because it has direct potential advantages for the initiating echelon but not necessarily for the groups which are lower in the organization structure. The top-down approach caters to the convenience of higher management. Under these circumstances, once the initiating agency is satisfied with the report results, it is very easy to overlook the necessity for feedback of information to the originating organization. The engineer, for instance, has poor reference for evaluating his estimates and progress without proper feedback. The basic inputs will not improve under these conditions and may, in fact, deteriorate. The requirement for more detailed inputs will not improve the situation nor will it improve the accuracy of the system reports. To improve overall accuracy, the accuracy of the basic data inputs must be improved. To do this we must provide the engineer or whoever else furnishes these basic inputs with good feedback so that he has an accurate understanding of his project status. As these top-down approaches become more sophisticated, information input requirements demand a finer degree of plan and progress detail. This information would be processed separately from normal reports and would serve as a check on the accuracy of the reports. This has a serious implication. It implies that although a man was considered responsibly competent to make a detailed plan of his program, he is not considered equally responsible or competent to report his progress accurately. The problem is not one of competence but of progress data input to the reporting person. A report can be no more accurate than the supporting details. PERT, because it was designed as a top-down system, has often been guilty of this approach. Other problems arise with a top-down approach. For example, some engineers do not consider their projects complex enough to warrant experimentation with a new method of planning and control. Under the circumstances they see no direct advantage to themselves from the use of PERT. It is very necessary for us to overcome this attitude. The reason: PERT was primarily designed to control projects that are predominantly engineering and scientific in nature. We must receive good inputs from our engineers to develop good PERT networks. Both our original estimates and our progress information have to come from the men who are doing the work. If they do not accept PERT, a great deal of effectiveness can be lost. PERT can be useful at lower as well as upper echelons. The problem is to cultivate the need for PERT. The key is to convince the reluctant or would-be user that network planning can be at least as much help to him as any procedure he now has. This calls for application of what I call the bottom-up approach. Our Program Planning organization in the Armament & Control Products Section has been established Planning Unit is an engineering function and with this approach in mind. In our plant, the Program reports to the manager of Engineering Administration. The unit is staffed with 3 graduate engineers, 1 engineering technical specialist and 3 program planning schedulers. This group provides service to 200 engineers. The program planning engineers have the responsibility for teaching the basic techniques of PERT to the Design Engineers. They aid the engineers in the details of their planning and they develop methods for using PERT to control program progress. The schedulers make detailed analyses of the PERT networks and produce finished networks from the engineers sketches. Our approach is to help the engineers as much as possible.
To facilitate the bottom-up approach and to reduce the clerical load of our engineers, we have developed a set of programs for the IBM 1620 Computer that will completely analyze network data from the standpoint of time and cost. On this relatively simple computer we can actually provide all of the calculation results for 1000 event networks that the more complex machines can provide. The programs and the computer are simple enough for the engineer to run himself. Thus, he has the chance to test several variations of his proposed plan before he decides on the best approach. One program will actually calculate dates for the events and activities. Another of these programs that will most likely be of interest to Cost Engineers is one we call PERT PROJECT FORECASTING (PPF). By associating labor and material cost with the network activities we can quickly calculate the projected cost and time of any network or any part of a network. A secondary result of PPF is a graphic portrayal of resource commitment versus project time. On another program we have simplified the standard PERT probability calculation and have added a feature which we call probability profile. This feature gives several time-conditional, probability These programs form a part of a simple, integrated data processing calculations for a single event. system which is capable of maintaining up-to-date records of a program and providing status information on short notice. These are advantages that our engineers did not previously have. We are encouraging them to use these techniques so that they can improve their own planning capabilities. As a result of our approach, we expect to see better work attitudes, better technical growth of the individuals, better planning and estimating, improved schedule performance, and increased ability to handle larger and more complex jobs. By this bottom-up approach we will maintain an industrial metabolism in our engineering organization that will contribute to its being a vital organization ready to accept any technological challenge. We also expect that our progress reporting data, which is basically supplied by the engineers on the job, will be much more accurate because we have given to inthose same engineers a better picture of their job. The use of this approach is preferable creasing the complexity of the reporting system.