The Growth of the Navy Contracting Workforce and Its Impact on Levels of Contracting Activity

Abstract

The U.S. Department of the Navy (DoN) 2010 acquisition workforce (AWF) strategic plan noted that, since the 1990s, the value of DoN contracting had increased by more than 50% while the acquisition workforce had declined by almost 50%. In response, as a component of the Department of Defense (DoD), the DoN set an objective to in-source at least 3,500 civilian positions over the Future Years Defense Program period and hire an additional 1,590 civilians using funds from the Defense Acquisition Workforce Development Fund. These actions would lead to an increase of 8% in the civilian acquisition workforce over the subsequent six years. Given this increase in personnel, the following questions have been asked: What has been the impact of this change in acquisition staffing within the DoN, and how is acquisition different now than with the previous smaller workforce? Addressing these issues is not straightforward, due to the complex structure of both the acquisition workforce and of the acquisition activities themselves.Another fruitful avenue of research would be extending our work on the impact of the growth in the acquisition workforce to the area of program management, notably using the multiple databases made available through DAVE (Defense Acquisition Visibility Environment), a relatively recent service that incorporates DAMIR (Defense Acquisition Management Information Retrieval). The field of program management (PM) is much broader than contract management and arguably incorporates most contract management activity. Notably, PM involves participation by all the acquisition career fields and would have multiple measures of outputs and outcomes. Exploring the PM results of the growth in the acquisition workforce since 2008 represents an exciting avenue of future research. Future work will also include applying a powerful range of statistical and analytical modeling that may provide a reasonable indication of the impact of the AWF growth initiative. These modeling activities might include the following: a. Statistical significance comparing before-and-after effects (using two-sample dependent T tests and F tests, ANOVA, MANOVA) b. Linear and nonlinear correlation matrices with statistical significance c. Nonlinear econometric models to identify and determine the critical independent variables that are statistically significant, as well as quantifying their impact and results of the dependent variables and related metrics d. Creating new metrics beyond those mentioned previously, by collapsing multiple variables into composite measures that provide a more comprehensive and cohesive indication of the impact of the growth of the acquisition workforce e. Monte Carlo simulations to determine the final probability distribution and impact of changed manning levels. These distributions could serve as a benchmark for current and future metrics such as increases in acquisition complexity. A key element of future work will be separating acquisition programs into levels of complexity; these categorizations could then be used to predict the turnover, schedule risk, and cost risk of new acquisition programs. The resulting models could be of great use to management in assisting with the direction of PM activity.