Etter—on the job since the end of October as assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition—had been hinting at making some command chain changes since her arrival. She made them official in a Feb. 23 memorandum to senior Navy managers.

She noted in the memo that the programs with DRPMs had “generally progressed” and no longer required her direct supervision. “Those programs are at the stage where they will most effectively deliver capability as a part of an existing PEO.”

The Navy had five DRPMs, and Godwin was the newest, having been made a DRPM last May by Etter’s predecessor, John Young. Of the five programs with managers reporting to Etter, only one will retain its DRPM. That exception is the Strategic Systems Program. Its DRPM, Rear Adm. Charles Young, will continue in the job according to Etter’s memo (see box, next page).

“Godwin and I both looked at the status of NMCI and said, ‘We can do better than this.’ ” — EDS’ Mike Koehler

The DRPM title, used throughout the military, is a designation that senior acquisition executives bestow when they want a program to report directly to them rather than through a PEO. The assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition can appoint a DRPM to a program for any number of reasons, says Capt. Tom Van Leunen, public affairs officer for the assistant secretary. The person running the program, if in the military, might outrank the PEO; the program might be so large and broad that it will have an impact on everyone in that branch of the military; or the program might simply be performing poorly and need high-level attention.

In the case of NMCI, probably all three reasons applied. Godwin was higher in the Defense hierarchy than the PEO for IT, Steve Ehrler. NMCI is an $8.8 billion program to link voice, video and data communications throughout the Navy. Since the Navy awarded the contract to EDS Corp. in October 2000, the massive outsourcing initiative has faced ongoing complaints about inferior computer performance, problematic support and slow rollouts.

The creation of the PEO and DRPM titles and their associated reporting chains throughout the Defense Department date back to the late 1980s and result from the recommendations of the 1986 Packard Commission on improving Defense program management.

In the Navy, all PEOs report to Etter and have dotted-line reporting authority to the leaders of the commands within which the programs fall. According to Navy officials, Etter reserves the right to use DRPMs in unique instances where procurements need special oversight, but all DRPM assignments will be temporary and plans must exist for migrating the programs to PEOs.

Godwin, who spoke with Defense Systems before Etter named him to his new PEO post, says that as a DRPM he had authority to effect changes to solve NMCI problems and that the assignation also gave senior Navy management more insight into the program. The biggest immediate impact was stopping the erosion of NMCI’s budget, he says. Although he refused to release specific figures, Godwin says that before the restructuring, NMCI’s budget was shrinking because no one could justify the resource needs. “If we’ve stopped the hemorrhaging and stabilized the budget, that’s a tremendous gain to get the services delivered,” he says.

Booster Shot
As part of his effort to bring more control of the project inside the Navy, Godwin also increased the number of government NMCI staff, from three to nine. His office also subsumed the two separate project offices—one for the Marine Corps and one for the Navy—that previously split management of NMCI services. Now, he’s looking for a new program manager. Marie Greening, former deputy program manager for NMCI, is acting in the job while the Navy searches for a permanent replacement.

In recent months, EDS also made changes to mesh with the shifts at the Navy. Now five years into a seven-year contract that has a three-year option, the contractor has replaced and increased its NMCI staff, says Mike Koehler, EDS’ enterprise client executive for the Navy deal. The company’s NMCI team, which previously had about 10 members, now has 25. It’s not that the EDS staff was performing poorly, he says, but “people build up scar tissue from previous engagements that didn’t go so well,” and the program needed fresh people with new ideas. “Godwin and I both looked at the status of NMCI and said, ‘We can do better than this,’ ” Koehler says.

But some thought NMCI was faring worse, not better, under the DRPM structure. PC installations, for example, slowed dramatically, according to one Navy source who requested anonymity. In fact, at a meeting in July, Young “lambasted Godwin because he wasn’t rolling seats,” the official says.

The changes in the NMCI office represented a recognition that the government needed to play a bigger role in managing the buy. “When NMCI was initially envisioned, we thought that most of what we needed would come from EDS. We found that that wasn’t the case,” Godwin says.

Despite its problems, the program has succeeded in establishing a common computing platform for the service. According to NMCI records, EDS has added more than 294,000 seats to the PC network. Ultimately, the goal is to cut more than 360,000 seats.

NMCI now runs more like a traditional Navy acquisitions program than a commercial contract, Koehler says. The degree to which the service initially ceded management responsibility for the program to EDS was unusual, he says. In addition, Godwin’s fairly recent creation of three integrated product teams—one for deploying NMCI seats, another for assessing and migrating legacy systems to NMCI and a third for handling support—fits with the more typical Navy approach to outsourcing and brings more management in-house, Koehler says.

Godwin also has added experts, in engineering, contracting, law and other disciplines, who float among the three teams. This puts “a more rigorous structure into the program,” Godwin says. “It wasn’t very sound the way it was.”

Additional reporting by Defense Systems editor Dawn S. Onley.

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