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Appendix F
The Army Research Laboratory's Process for Ensuring Relevance
For the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the definition of relevance is how well a
research and development (R&D) organization is performing its mission for the benefit of its
stakeholders.1,2 Thus, for an organization, or within the organization individual programs or
even projects, to be relevant requires that their stakeholders be identified and the requirements or
needs or desires of the stakeholders be made known. In the most fundamental sense this requires
that the organization take several steps:
Identify its stakeholders and customers: Does it know who it is supposed to be
supporting?
Communicate with the stakeholders and customers: Ask them what they want or need.
Negotiate the technological terms to the extent necessary.
Direct an appropriate amount of effort toward fulfilling those needs.
Continue to communicate with the stakeholders or customers as the work progresses:
This communication is needed to ensure that strategies and work are going in the right
direction and that requirements have not changed.
Follow up after delivery of the final product: This follow-up is needed to ensure that
the stakeholders' or customers' needs have been fulfilled. If not, an examination is
needed of ways to fix problems and develop improved processes for the future.
Based on the work of Edward B. Roberts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
Sloan School of Management, the ARL identified the following stakeholders. The Army's
research, development, and engineering centers (RDECs), in particular, were considered
immediate customers, whose missions were, in general terms, to develop materiel solutions to
Army problems and to engineer these devices in preparation for production and fielding. The
RDECs rely on the ARL to provide them with the basic and/or applied technology from which
RDECs can carry out their development and engineering missions. Another significant group of
ARL stakeholders consists of the various senior Army management organizations and funding
activities. These include ARL's parent organizations, such as the Research, Development, and
Engineering Command (RDECOM) and the Army Materiel Command (AMC), plus the senior
Army management--the Army staff. The ARL relevance issues for these organizations revolve
around how well the ARL is functioning as a support to the larger Army structure. The other
major stakeholder is the end-item user--the soldier in the field, represented by Army program
managers and program executive officers as well as the Army Training and Doctrine Command
(TRADOC).
1
E. Brown, 1997. Measuring Performance at the Army Research Laboratory: The Performance Evaluation
Construct. Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, Md.
2
E. Brown, 1998. Reinventing Government Research and Development: A Status Report on Management Initiatives
and Reinvention Efforts at the Army Research Laboratory. Report No. ARL-SR-57. Army Research Laboratory,
Adelphi, Md.
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In addition to these stakeholders identified above are such entities as Department of
Defense (DOD) leadership, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB), the Congress, and eventually the public.
When the ARL was established in 1993, the decision was made to develop processes by
which it could show its relevance specifically to its stakeholders or customers and to the senior
Army leadership. The chartering document required that several specific actions be taken with
regard to its stakeholders and customers, the rationale being that concentrating most of the basic
and applied materiel research in one organization with little to no development activity ran a very
real risk of decoupling the newly formed corporate laboratory from the rest of the Army--that is,
it ran the risk that ARL could lose its relevance. Thus, the ARL was required to direct at least 50
percent of its program resources toward stakeholder or customer requirements. This 50 percent
requirement limited discretionary spending ability and thus provided a balance that did not stifle
creativity but at the same time prevented an ivory tower effect from taking hold.
Meeting this requirement was accomplished by having the first ARL director meet with
his counterparts in the RDECs; a memorandum of understanding (MOU) was executed in which
each acknowledged this relationship. Then, for the directed tasks to be undertaken, ARL line
managers were required to execute a Technical Program Annex (TPA) to the original MOU; the
TPA was a one-page contract signed by the ARL line manager and one of his counterparts from a
customer organization specifying the details of the work to be done. These details included a
description of the specific task, the application of the end product by the customer, the amount of
funds that the ARL would expend on this task, points of contact in both organizations, and any
other information deemed necessary. The TPAs had to sum to at least half of ARL's base
funding. This novel approach was deemed to be very unusual since, in effect, the ARL was
asking its customers' permission to spend its own money. At the end of the year, the customer
signatory on each TPA was surveyed to determine the level of satisfaction attained. If there were
any complaints, or if the customer's needs were not satisfied, a senior ARL manager was
required to contact the customer about how to correct the situation.
Another piece of this customer-relevance construct was a board of directors (BOD)
created by that original charter. The BOD members were the directors of the RDECs that
constituted ARL's customer base. The BOD would meet at least once a year at the ARL to
review how well the laboratory had been serving their people. They reviewed the results of the
year's TPA process as well as other processes. They then made comments, observations,
suggestions, and recommendations as to the state of their relationship with the ARL and how, if
necessary, improvements could be made. This entire process ensured that the laboratory would
indeed be closely coupled and very relevant to its customer organizations.
In order to reach the senior leadership, the ARL conceived of a device called the
Stakeholders' Advisory Board (SAB). The ARL director approached the commanding general
(four-star) of the AMC, ARL's parent organization, who agreed to chair a group of senior Army
staff. By the group's charter, the purpose of the SAB was to ensure that the ARL was closely
coupled to the Army's vision of how it would fight in the future, ensure that the ARL would be
responsive to and support the Army's senior leadership as it evolved the doctrine and
requirements for the Army of the 21st century, and ensure that the ARL would be sustained as a
valuable resource for providing the technological edge to shape the future Army.
The SAB's membership included the senior members of the Army staff--G1 (personnel
administration), G2 (intelligence and security), G3 (operations), G4 (logistics), the deputy under
secretary, and other members, all at the three-star or equivalent level. Reaching the soldier in the
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field personally was not possible. However, one member of the SAB was the deputy commander
(three-star) of the TRADOC, which describes itself as the user's representative.
The SAB would meet at the ARL once a year for a half day, during which it would be
briefed on ARL's activities of the past year and its projections and challenges for the upcoming
year. The SAB would then be given a few short technology briefings on recent breakthroughs, a
summary briefing from both the BOD and the Technical Assessment Board (TAB) of the
National Academies' National Research Council in order to get a complete picture of all facets of
the laboratory's activities, a tour of the facilities with demonstrations of technologies, and a
working lunch at which time the chairman (the AMC commander) would solicit from each
member opinions, critiques, suggestions, requests, and recommendations. These activities were
captured as notes and action items, with the action items being scrupulously responded to over
the next few months. Thus, the ARL was able to reach out and communicate its performance
and achievements to assure this very senior group of stakeholders of its relevance.
This activity proved to be an enormously powerful management tool for ensuring the
laboratory's relevance and performance as an Army asset. Demonstrating this close relationship
with its customers and senior stakeholders served to drive ARL's performance. However, the
SAB concept was abandoned after 2000. With the formation of RDECOM as a new command
organization injected between the ARL and the AMC, it was no longer possible from a protocol
standpoint to bypass the two-star RDECOM commander to the four-star AMC commander in
order to continue the latter's chairing of the SAB, nor could the RDECOM commander summon
all the three-star SAB members to assemble.
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