________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
A:
Oh, probably 8, 9 percent.
Q:
Eight or nine?
A:
Everybody thinks it was a lot smaller, but everybody in the time frame of 31 July to 9
August, I mean, it was probably nine straight days.
Q:
At the end, yes.
A:
We had an awful lot of good staff. I leaned very heavily on Pat Kenney and his staff, the
project manager, Ken Calabrese, Dave Spivey, Mike Yeomans, Joan Stolley, Brenda Evans,
Ed Huempfner, Pat Cobb. They're very good people.
The technicians really were great folks. Page's problem with them was, you know, that they
came over and they really didn't understand his corporate level questions. We sent them out
as messengers instead of taking them with us to provide technical advice as leaders carried
the mail. We asked them to reflect management's view instead of the manager going over
and saying, "I want this because I want it." So, I mean, that one little change of technique
helped right there. We had great folks, and they were very helpful.
So, I presided, I facilitated, I showed up for all the meetings with the functional persons, and
I required the function chiefs to brief personally because I wanted the bosses signed up. You
see, the other thing we achieved during that process was a consensus because they were all
involved.
By this process, one couldn't sit back and say, "Ah, the CEAP. I've heard it's going to do
this, it's going to do that." Each was involved, so he had to buy in early. We got the division
engineers early. We didn't have 100 percent coalescing of opinion on it, but we're a heck of a
lot higher than we ever were before, and I think we have a good product, and we saved an
awful lot of money.
We're only buying probably 50 percent as much as was estimated at one time--remembering
that they were all option years. We never had to buy it all. If you projected that we would buy
it all and put it all out in 13 places, it was to be about million. We're now going to invest
about million and put it in two places.
Q:
This is really the product of the last year?
A:
That's right. In the last year we developed an architecture for doing the Corps' work. We
really have an understanding of what all the boxes in these fifteen functional areas are. We
really have an understanding of what ought to go in there. We really know what the key ones
are that must interconnect--that's project management, financial management, program
management, real estate--and we built a way to isolate an executive database to pull stuff up,
just data we need at Headquarters, USACE.
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