COMP 4050 - Project Management

Term Paper

Tinotenda T.S. Machida

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COMP 4050 Project Management - Term Paper
US Air Force Expeditionary Combat Support System

Introduction

This paper is based off the failure of implementation of basic project management

principles and practices on large scale projects, to be specific, the US Air Force

Expeditionary Combat Support System, an Enterprise Resource Planning and

Management System for the US Airforce.

An Enterprise Resource Planning and Management System is a software methodology

that traditionally combines all elements of an enterprise (logistics, finance, sales, etc.)

into one shared database solution

The project was undertaken by the United States Air Force between the period of 2004

and 2012 procuring a 1.1 Billion loss just before it was cancelled in November 2012.

The system was meant to be a single resource unified logistics and supply chain

management system for the Airforce but poor process planning and a wide variety of

mishaps led to its failure. Two integrators, Oracle and Computer Sciences Corporation,
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took on the challenge under the supervision and management of military personnel in

the US Department of Defense.

It was supposed re-implement the force’s Enterprise Resource Planning and

Management System, a logistics support system, managing inventories, keeping track

of all the army’s physical assets, handling supply chain management and through all

that hopefully providing cost savings and better efficiency. It was supposed to manage

everything from aircraft, onboard hardware, fuel, spare parts, ammunition and

weaponry.The challenge existed in the fact that US Air Force has one of the largest,

most complex supply chains in the world as it includes, delivery, transport,

maintenance, repairs, procurement, inventory and a very expensive product life-cycle

management.

The philosophy at the time was to utilize the Commercial-Off-The-Shelf software to

replace the legacy business system software and adjust the current Air Force business

process to accommodate the Commercial-Off-The-Shelf software capabilities. The

system was supposed to be a merge of over 700 systems all running different software

and needed at least a decent amount of planning before implementation. In such a large

undertaking, one would assume that this would be when project management principles

would be applied best and with the uttermost adherence, but this was not the case.
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US Air Force Expeditionary Combat Support System

The project was doomed from the get go and saw constant overturning of leadership

and went through a series of phases which all led to failure. Value was not delivered

and after wasting 8 years and procuring a 1.1 Billion deficit nothing close to tangible had

been produced. The project demonstrates the consequences and cruciality of key

project management principles and what happens when the project managers involved

do no practice them. It has been one of the most renowned case studies when it comes

to failure to manage large scale military software projects, hence this is why i have

chosen to cover this topic respectively.

Overview

The US’s involvement in Iraq and other wars in 2004 saw a need for it comprehensively

keep track of it’s inventory and become more efficient in it’s chain supply management.

It had a lot of troops overseas and found it necessary to streamline their chain supply

management into one system. Previous systems had already existed but they operated

on different platforms and managed different sub-departments hence compatibility

between systems when it came to logistics was a problem. Extensive market research

was done and it was deemed that there wasn’t a single commercial off-the shelf solution

to which would support all the military specific functionalities.

With this in mind they saw the need to merge the system into one system which handles

everything.The department of justice saw a need for this and began drafting a
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framework. Political involvement also contributed as a motivation for the development of

the system. After the framework was done, Oracle and Computer Sciences Corporation

won the tender to implement it under the direct supervision of the department of justice

leading the project. In October 2005, Oracle, Inc. was awarded as the

Commercial-Off-The Shelf software provider.

The project was supposedly meant be in 3 phases. The first phase would include the

planning and blue-printing systems, the second would be testing and the last phase

would be deployment. System requirements were only added in the testing phase and

this caused a major restructure of the program in 2009, pushing their second milestone

over a year late. Despite some progress made in 2010 the milestone was delayed by

another year. The program eventually incurred a Critical Change determination in

August of 2010. Following this event, the Office of the Secretary of Defense conducted

a technical risk assessment and determined that the Pilot Baseline Review, one of the

prerequisites for Milestone B, were insufficient. The Air Force and Computer Sciences

Corporation tried to make a recovery plan to save the project the very same year. After

several meetings it became apparent the project was failing to meet its objectives and

some of the objectives were really not clear. In 2012 in attempt to salvage the program,

a final meeting was conducted with a panel of strategists which led to a strategic pause,

in which three Courses of Actions were considered: stay the course; further de-scope

the program; or cancel the program. It was later decided that it was best to cancel the

program. So, what really went wrong with the program?

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Causes Of Failure

1. The Actual Project Managers Involved

In such a large scale project which involves so many moving parts it’s great that

the Department Of Defence was involved in the project, as it was their project to

begin with. The mistake made is in the selection of project managers from the

department who had limited knowledge about the systems involved and hence

could not make accurate and optimal decisions when it came to the direction of

the project.The officials involved were very senior officials and some had very

limited experience with the systems that were meant to be implemented. This

made Oracle and Computer Sciences Corporation’ s job difficult as they were

dealing with people who had limited knowledge of what the specific system

requirements should be. There was also great deviation in the business and

organisational approach to the project as the Air Force and Department of

Justice played the role of both the client and the project managers. This meant

that business processes re-engineering would not be conventional. Typically the

client would not be hands-on with the actual project but would simply provide

input as to the requirements and direction of the project.

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2. Objectives, Scope, Budget, Time Estimation

The primary objective of the project was very clear from the get go. It was meant

to be a system to replace the old methodologies of Enterprise Resource Planning and

Management. However the nitty-gritties were not thought about carefully. With pressure

coming from the government and political involvement for the project to get started, the

most crucial part of the project was not undertaken carefully. When it comes to such

large scale projects, planning is everything. Part of the poor planning stems from the

fact that the people involved had limited knowledge of what needs to be done or the

previous systems. In the beginning the scope was not precisely defined. This led to a

huge under-estimation of the scope. The military had the “ Yes, we can do it!” attitude

without carefully considering the scope of the project. It was only when they got to

phase 2 when they realized the true size and nature of the project they were

undertaking.

A scope that is too big distorts the project’s objectives. Just as scope, budget and time

are related, this led to a huge overrun in the project’s budget and a critical schedule slip.

The total cost of the project was meant to be 3 Billion the project was estimated to be

done by 2012. The risk assessment done in 2012 revealed that the project needed

another 1.1 Billion dollars just to cover a quarter of the originally proposed scope and

that it would only be done by 2020 if continued to completion. In all this time it seems

the project managers involved did not realise this.

3​​. Poor System Requirements

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As a project manager, before undertaking or even starting to implement code, on of the

first things to do would be to obtain the system requirements of the project. Apparently

this wasn’t exhausted as the scope was not well known by the project managers

involved to begin with. It took them 5 years (only in 2009), to realize that the system

they had been working on all along and testing did not meet the baseline system

requirements. The challenge was that the system was merging multiple systems into

one big systems hence finding system requirements for a merge was difficult. More time

must have been spent in trying to find the system requirements for the the actual

project. As a project manager it would have been crucial that this be discussed first in

the planning phase.

4. Poor Risk Management + Feasibility Assessment

It was no secret that this undertaking was something that had never been done by any

other company before. As a project manager it’s crucial to have an accurate

assessment of the feasibility and risk involved with the project. The United States Air

Force messed up when they pushed this project to be easily feasible without doing an

accurate assessment. This ties back to scope and system requirements. Since they did

not know the very crucial things it was easy to assume that the project would be

feasible. It was the project manager’s duty to make sure that they do an accurate

assessment of the risk involved and the feasibility. Unfortunately the people who were

heading the project at the very top were military personnel who had very limited

experience with building large complex software. Being military personnel they had the “
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We can do it all” attitude without actually sitting down to analyze what the project

actually entails. This is part of what led to the stall in 2009.

5. Poor Management and Too many overturns

During the 8 years that the program run, the project saw a lack of leadership continuity

with a total of 6 different program managers and 5 executive officers. This was simply

too many overturns each time a new official was appointed this would reduce the value

of the project as the new official has to learn their position and get to speed with what

their position entails. This causes gaps in execution and gaps in knowledge and history

of the project. The outgoing executive can only do so much to impart knowledge to the

incoming one. It’s no secret that whenever there is transfer of knowledge from one

entity to another, some always doesn’t make it through. Hence with each overturn,

crucial knowledge in the project was being lost as it was transferred from one individual

to the other, hence a decline in value. With each incoming appointee institutional

knowledge is partly lost.

6.Poor Measurement

During the project only cost and effort were recorded. There was very minimal progress

and performance reports. During the undertaking of a project, as a project manager it's

crucial to have reports on a timely basis. It doesn’t have to take 5-8 years to come to the

conclusion that your wheels are just spinning and not progress is being made. One
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would also find that the reports in this project were not based on a work breakdown

structure hence it was difficult to coordinate the whole entire project.

7.Poor Communication

As a project manager it’s key that you encourage contribution and communication from

your team members on a regular basis. This allows everyone to get to speed and builds

a sense of ownership of the project. It also allows team members to add value to the

project by being able to point out key issues. In the ECSS this was not practiced. Key

decisions were mainly made by the Department Of Defence leaving out the contribution

of the actual team members who were hands on on the project. Decisions made often

affected new personnel the most and team members with less familiarity with the

project. Considering that the project had over a 1000 team members by 2009,

executive decisions which may seem small would have large consequences to the rest

of the team as more people are involved.

Recommendations

Many mistakes were made in this project. Of the many mistakes that were made, i have

a few recommendations of what should and could have been done better by the project

managers involved. The first thing is that the project managers should not have also

taken the role of the client. Their involvement in the project should have been as a client

not as a client/project manager. This would allow Oracle and CSS to execute and take

on their role of providing value to their client without their direct influence.
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The second thing i would recommend would be that extensive research be done on

system requirements and scope first. The project took off before any of the two were

defined and code was being typed before anyone had an idea of the scope. It would

have been crucial for the project manager to create a team that would go on and

breakdown each of the 700 different systems to see what they entail and then from

there be able to see what the true scope is. Also from the scope, system requirements

would arise and hence better the execution of the program.

The third recommendation would be on accurate and timely measurement of progress.

The project’s project was not measured periodically and reports were very minimal. As a

project manager, reports should be as detailed and one should be able to compare the

reports to the master schedule to see whether or not key milestones have been met and

what to adjust in order to speed up the project and hence make progress faster, reduce

the scope or adjust the budget well ahead of time. A risk assessment was only done 8

years and 1.1 Billion dollars later. If the assessment had been done earlier it would have

saved a lot of money and time

My last and final recommendation would be on communication and critical decision

making. The Department of Defence did not involve Oracle or CSS on most crucial

decisions when it came to the direction of the project. Instead they made decisions and

simply informed their contractors what needed to be done without any consultation of
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the team members who had a better understanding of how the legacy systems worked.

As a project manager, it’s your duty to make sure that before crucial decisions are

made, you analyze their far reaching consequences and you consult experts within your

team first. This was not done.

Conclusion

The ECSS program failed because of many reasons, but there is not a single doubt that

the key contributor to the failure was the poor application of basic project management

principles. From this project alone we can see the far reaching consequences of how a

project can go wrong and how much money can be lost if simple principles are not

applied and adhered to.We also see the importance of familiarity and competency as a

project manager. Project managers are important people with a lot of responsibilities on

their shoulders and hence they should be capable people.

Sources/ Bibliography
Sources

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2493041/it-careers/air-force-scraps-massive-erp-project-

after-racking-up--1b-in-costs.html

https://www.acq.osd.mil/parca/docs/2011-ida-rca-ecss-p-4732.pdf

1.​https://www.acq.osd.mil/parca/docs/2011-ida-rca-ecss-p-4732.pdf​ - Institute for Defense Root

Cause Analyses Report
2.​https://www.computerworld.com/article/2493041/it-careers/air-force-scraps-massive-erp-proje
ct-after-racking-up--1b-in-costs.html​- Computerworld.com
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3.​https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/air-forces-expeditionary-combat-support-sys
tem-ecss/​ - centreforpublicimpact.org

4.​http://calleam.com/WTPF/?p=4914​ -calleam.com

5.​https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/PSI%20REPORT%20-%20The%20Air%20Forc
e's%20ECSS%20(July%207%202014).pdf​ - United States Senate Subcommittee of
Investigations

6.​https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CPRT-113SPRT89869/pdf/CPRT-113SPRT89869.pdf​ -
https://www.gpo.gov

7.​https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/technology/air-force-stumbles-over-software-modernizati
on-project.html​ - NewYorkTimes.com

8. ​https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10682539​ - Stanford.edu

9.
http://www.thepercellgroup.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ecss_publicly_releasable.pd
f​ - ​http://www.thepercellgroup.com​ Eecutive Summary

10. ​http://blogs.lt.vt.edu/bit5624/2012/12/​ - blogs.lt.vt.edu

11​.https://www.nbcnews.com/video/1-billion-wasted-on-air-force-computer-system-1779872393
5?v=a&