With declining resources, the U.S. Army is working to become more precise in the measurement of management statistics. The U.S. Army Combined Arms Center has been implementing one of the Army's most innovative computer systems to be a better indicator on how the leadership tracks the organizations successes.
The Combined Arms Center has been building the U.S. Army's Strategic Management System into its daily work flow for the past 18 months. The leadership sees this as a more sophisticated way to evaluate performance management for the organization.
"There are three primary areas where we will use SMS: the community health promotion council; the monthly management meeting; and to track initiatives under the TRADOC campaign plan," said Kirby Brown, deputy to the commanding general of U.S Army Combined Arms Center. "The community health promotion council and monthly management meetings are more statistics driven and the initiatives are more progress driven. We will see how we are doing and decided how to best allocate resources for each area."
Strategy Management System is a web-based Army Enterprise system that can be accessed from multiple locations and is intended to help the team better forecast for the future.
"There's no client software; so, there's nothing you need to maintain on your desktop," said Lt. Col. Guy Buice, director of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center Knowledge Management. "It's all done through the browser. Mr. Brown has the command on a trajectory toward live data. We realized the power of historical data -- archiving things and watching trends. The more you can look back, the further you can see forward."
"Most importantly, it provides an automatic historic record for trend analysis," Brown said. "Two years from now, I will be able to see how we did each fiscal year and compare it to future forecasting."
Bringing SMS on board allows the management team to virtually replace the usual PowerPoint presentations. Presentation software is typically good for a snap shot in time, but doesn't allow for efficient trend analysis. Combined Arms Center meetings will now begin with a look at what is being termed a "heat map," which shows each section represented as green, amber or red based on whether or not that team is current reaching their stated goals for that month.
"SMS allows us to build a briefing book and charts to view a large number of measures quickly, analyze trends and forecast for the future," Brown said. "After we get a broad overview in meetings through the heat map, we can drill down into each section and see which issues are causing that -- was it an anomaly event that month, was it a lack of resources or was it one subordinate element. It allows me to make better utilization of our personnel by eliminating unnecessary preparation of separate chart briefings that may be the same data."
Another benefit to SMS is that it is easily shareable. Any command element above U.S. Army Combined Arms Center could log on at any time and review the progress of each section if so inclined.
"If the commander requests information on the progress of a specific initiative, we don't have to put together a special presentation and email files all over the place," Brown said. "We simply link to the relevant information and send it to the commander."
Brown sees challenges ahead for the implementation of SMS into the Combined Arms Center ecosystem, but he is determined to make sure the new system becomes institutional.
"We have two challenges," Brown said. "One, it's a significant culture change by changing the flavor of the management meeting. Culture change is hard. Two, it will take a long time for change to return the investment in training. We're probably halfway through getting on board -- which will be done this fiscal year.
"The key to SMS is that we commit to doing it in the future," Brown added. "It's not one of those latest trends. It's a standard systemic way to do performance management, organizing data and using technology to return a gain. It requires a significant change in our approach to meetings, but it will make for a better, more consistent meeting and we will be much faster to execution."
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