Qualitative Data Analysis of PPBE Reform Recommendations in the Open Literature

Abstract

The Acquisition Innovation Research Center (AIRC)—in support of the Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, Execution (PPBE) Reform (ppbereform.senate.gov)—extracted and analyzed reform recommendations from 144 sources (e.g., open literature reports, podcasts, and articles). Our paper summarizes the findings from the qualitative data analysis (QDA) of the recommendations found in these sources. This analysis provides an overview of primary and secondary themes found in the literature along with their frequency of occurrence in our sample. Our results provide a comprehensive summary and overview of the community’s ideas and thoughts related to improving PPBE and the primary areas that are ripe for improvement. We will discuss the approach taken to identify sources, extract the 262 recommendations, conduct clustering to identify themes, and assess if the recommendations were deemed actionable or not. We will also quantify how this corpus aligns with the recommendations from the PPBE Reform Commission in their March 2024 final report as well as the range of other ideas and recommendations remaining for consideration by the Department of Defense.