Team 2 Week 2 Blog

Hacking for Defense

Team 3

Week 2

 

Our second week beneficiary discovery focused on testing and receiving feedback on our MVP. Below, we list the interviews conducted this week and key takeaways from each.

 

Summary of Key Trends and Insights

  • Battalion and Company level commanders and S4s note that resource allocation efficiency is suffering due to disorganization, and this can be costly to readiness
  • The system must be comprehensive enough to replace existing administrative tools, such as the CEW. Otherwise, it will simply add more work and not be accepted by the unit.
  • Giving teams the ability to evaluate their training resource is one of the most valuable pain relievers that officers want. We will need to work on our MVP to include more training and mission evaluation categories

 

Captain Tim – Detachment Commander

  • Product would be useful and time saving as long as it isn’t added as a requirement on top other administrative requirements. thing they had to fill out it would be much more helpful.
  • A big problem is that they don’t know how much funding their battalion/group has
  • When justifying spending decisions he uses a mix of quantitative information and abstract relating back to training readiness.

 

Sergeant Major Johnny – Company Sergeant Major

  • Problem #1: lack of prioritizing is limiting factor to ODAs getting proper resources.
  • When they do a mid year plus-up- you must ask for resources at the middle of the year but they don’t get that ammo until the start of the fourth quarter.
  • If they give you what you asked for months late and don’t shoot it all you could be punished for that.

 

Captain Josh – Battalion Logistics Officer

  • Problem #1: system must be user friendly so that it can be accessed by people that are not subject matter experts and can handle high rates of turnover.
  • As of now, there is no system in place for tallying the final costs of training, but the battalion need this.
  • Would like to see an MVP with specifics such as points of contact and a method of organizing budget by date

 

Captain Erica – Company Commander, previously Battalion S4

  • The current equipment resourcing process involves a pool of money periodically being made available for allocation.  It is then a 48-hour rush to spend the money. Frequently, the first group to get their prioritized list in wins.
  • She confirmed the ODA budget worksheet is very complicated and frequently the formulas get scrambled by the users entering information.
  • Transportation and other per diems, military & commercial vendor costs would need to be regularly updated.

 

CW2 Bob, CW2 Zack – Assistant Detachment Commanders

  • A big problem is that when we come up with a concept to go train, from the time it gets briefed and budgeted, it grows a lot of “barnacles”  as more units get added. Needs to be adaptable.
  • The gap between estimated costs and actual costs won’t be solved if us at the team don’t know it’s a problem.
  • A useful tool would be to add 3 columns on the AAR: the budget, the final budget, and the mission essential tasks.   

 

Captain Dillon – US Army

  • Do you want your unit to be the Most-Trained Unit or the Best-Trained Unit? Having actual information on the efficiency of training will tell you.
  • Making the emphasis of spending record-keeping tied to how much readiness improved, which will move away from using totals of money spent as the yardstick.
  • Look at figuring out the cost of time. If you make a soldier stay in the field for an extra length of time, what does that actually cost?

 

Major Ryan – Battalion Executive Officer

  • “When I cycle out, I want the person who replaces me to not have to start over from zero. If we can get a system in place that they can plug into, it’ll go a long way.”
  • “Right now, my S4 has to do a lot of digging through old spreadsheets, which costs us a ton of time and prevents us from focusing on analysis.”
  • Ideally we want to know how much money gets us how much training.

 

Captain Rex – Field Artillery, US Army

  • Tying money to each task is very useful, and if you could say spending this amount gets you to a certain level, it would be more efficient.
  • Objective T incentivizes teams to underestimate their readiness at the beginning and overestimate it at the end
  • Ease of use for tracking is the most important aspect

 

Major Dodger – US Army

  • When people come back asking for money, the commanders need to be able to say “show us progress,” (on objective T) and then be able to say “go talk to x,” who did the training for a certain cost.
  • There needs to be a standardized way of evaluating in a more centralized way. That’ll be even trickier when it comes to very specialized training that SF teams have to do.

 


This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2019 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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