From Activity to Effectiveness: Unifying Efforts with a Common Vision and Roadmap

In 2012, the Navy reorganized the administration of pay and personnel under a consolidated organizational hierarchy. Part of the reason for the reorganization was to improve the capabilities and standardization of the Command Pay and Personnel Administrators (CPPA).

 

Work began immediately on improving systems for CPPAs, improving training for CPPAs, improving policy for CPPAs, etc. The work was somewhat unbalanced though, because some streams of the development could proceed much more rapidly than others. In fact, the difficulty surrounding lack of synchronization among the development streams created significant friction on more than one occasion.

 

Because the pace of improvements accelerated in 2017-2018 to coincide with other developments around the domain, these lack of synchronization difficulties became unbearable.

Through a series of weekly meetings with a cross-section of stakeholders, we carefully documented requirements for a mature CPPA capability and then mapped these requirements to existing and future initiatives (see figures above).

 

Although documenting and synchronizing requirements and initiatives is not an original idea, the benefits were immediate and unmistakable. Many of the existing synchronization issues vanished through simple conversation among the stakeholders, and development for slow-moving streams accelerated by giving them higher priority in the development stack. More importantly, we began to see small but measurable improvements in CPPA performance that could be tied directly to the now unified vision and roadmap. Simply having a planned roadmap made the trip run more smoothly.

 

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