Problem Solution Mba 580 Enviornamnetal Scanning

Forces or Trends 1 (from the remote or industry environment

(A) A detailed description of the force or trend

A trend within government, especially among the procurement agencies, such as the United States Air Force Space Command's Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), is the shrinking budget. Each year, Congress expects these agencies to produce more in defense capability for less money. Savings are then applied to the rebuilding of the Air Force infrastructure, such as more air fuel tankers, fighters, bombers and surveillance planes. This applies especially to the execution of such functional processes as program management, contracting and financial management. Such trends brought experimentation with such programs as Total System Program Responsibility, or TSPR, to eliminate the strict insight and oversight of programs by a large government workforce. After a number of failures, more government engineers and program managers were brought back into the process to ensure strict adherence to process quality in execution and delivery of hardware to the launch pad. As the war bills continue to come in more and more cuts in the acquisition budgets will be made to pay for the infrastructure bills.

(B) The relevance of the force or trend to your chosen organization

The 2007 budget bill mandated strict cuts in manpower to pay for capital infrastructure bills. The execution phase for the Air Force is known as Presidential Budget Decision Memorandum 720. This has forced personnel off of the Federal payroll and brought an increase in the contractor force. The cuts at the Space and Missile Systems Center amounted to approximately 470 positions over fiscal years 2007-2011. However, the accounting system has removed the positions in 2007 and already booked the savings.

(C) Your chosen organization's strategic adaptability for the force or trend.

Acquisition organizations are authorized large contingents of military officers in the fields of engineering, program management, financial management and contracting. In the last 10 years, the ability of the Air Force to actually recruit and man the force at that level has been severely strained. Consequently, the acquisition organizations have been actually assigned an average of about 50% of the actual manpower authorization. So, the positions taken off the books have had little impact on the organization's ability to function.

Forces or Trends 2 (from the remote or industry environment

(A) A detailed description of the force or trend

A trend within the Department of Defense (DoD) has been to adopt various principles of Lean and Six Sigma as employed in various industries, especially Toyota, Proctor and Gamble and other manufacturing organizations. The concept is to define processes and apply a set of tools to analyze the processes, identifying waste and inefficiencies, eliminating them, and if necessary reengineering the processes to cut cycle times and cost. This is known as "lean". The application of statistical process controls to both industrial processes and white collar processes alike is being used in DoD in both the logistics repair centers, and transactional organizations such as the Space and Missile Systems Center. The Air Force created the Lean Aerospace Initiative Consortium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000 to assist in developing the intellectual underpinnings of Lean. Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne is giving personal leadership to the Lean program he has dubbed as Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century or AFSO21.

(B) The relevance of the force or trend to your chosen organization

The AFSO21 program is viewed at SMC as an opportunity to review and reengineer processes based on paper transactions and antiquated modes of communication and data storage. It has undertaken. The relevance for SMC is its ability to review processes that are manpower intensive and apply automating tools to the various processes where