A Tale of Two Units

In the 1990’s, the Navy had three locations for basic training: Jacksonville, Florida. San Diego, California. And Great Lakes Naval Training Center (NTC), just north of Chicago, on the shore of Lake Michigan.?Everyone who enlisted in the Navy went to one of those three bases for boot camp. As you may imagine, Great Lakes was not the favorite, especially during the winter when wind chills could reach into negative double digits.

Also in the 1990’s, after a stint in the Air Force, I’d gotten a government job as a civilian with the Department of the Navy at Great Lakes.?I was a Program Analyst, and one of my duties was to help the center with the implementation of the Navy’s new Total Quality Leadership (TQL) Program. All the services were trying to capitalize on the private sector’s use of Total Quality Management (TQM) and the Navy branded their program TQL because, by God, the Navy LEADS, they don’t MANAGE. It was my first job specifically focused on Process Improvement.

Great Lakes NTC had two sides to the base. On one side was the Boot Camp. The other side had a variety of Advanced Schools.?Also called “A Schools.” They provided the technical training for Sailors after basic training…such things as radar operations, communications, fire-fighting, or whatever skills sailors needed for their assignment. While the two sides were on the same base, they could not have been more different.

The Admiral commanding the “A Schools” was old school. He’d commanded a battleship. He chomped cigars. When he gave orders, he barked. He saw TQL as an annoyance. To him, it was a fad, some touchy-feely bullshit he didn’t need. As I tried scheduling training for his staff, things always seemed to pop up and class had to be canceled. He had a billet for a Process Officer but did not fill it.?Even after a readiness review pointed out how his command could benefit from having a dedicated resource, he didn’t fill it. He knew how to run his ship, and he didn’t need some snot-nosed ex-Air Force geek teaching him how to sing Kumbaya.

The Admiral commanding the Boot Camp was the polar opposite. She’d also been a Commander: of a communications unit, and of a personnel division at the Pentagon. She was thoughtful, soft-spoken, and listened. When she spoke she did so with confidence, authority, and intelligence. She saw the value in TQL. Not only did she fill her opening for a Process Officer, but she also took 4 other billets out of her administration section to expand her TQL Office to five people. And what a team they were.

A young Lieutenant was her process officer, and the rest of the team were non-commissioned officers, ranging from a Chief Petty Officer with 15 years’ experience to a brand new Petty Officer. The Admiral gave them her full support and free reign. Sitting in on executive-level meetings, they tackled the issues most pressing to the leaders of the Boot Camp. And there were plenty: War II era buildings needing care. Dining Halls overcrowded. Recruits suffering from stress fractures. So the team went to work.

For the buildings, they established standard work processes for receiving work orders, prioritizing them, and allocating repair crews in the most efficient manner. (On a side note, they reported building status to leaders…it’s the only executive-level meetings I’d ever seen with slides reporting on the number of operational heads [aka toilets]).

To ease crowding at dining halls, they created flow charts and tracked traffic with Pareto charts. This allowed analysis which led to?better schedules to even out the flow of sailors getting chow.

Addressing the stress fractures has been one of my favorite stories. Seems a lot of kids enlisting aren’t used to marching around all day in leather-soled boots?Many of them developed stress fractures in their feet. This would cause them to wash out of training, or be put on medical deferment; lowering yield rates of graduation. The TQL team did root cause analysis and determined better footwear was needed. They did research and found an athletic shoe that provided best support at a reasonable cost. As they tested them, they found out the shoes needed to be properly fitted to have the best results. The TQL team designed standard work to ensure proper fitting. They did it so well, that they could hand the instructions to a kid pulled off the line and have them do the fitting. Improved customer service without hiring additional labor. Stress fractures decreased over 50% in the first month.

Meantime, across the street, the “A School” kept doing things the way they’d always done. With the status quo, they were seeing higher turnover rates of staff, lowering graduation rates, and increasing facility costs. But, hey, nobody was bothering them about the TQL stuff (except for that pesky ex-Air Force dweeb). That is until the Inspector General (IG) appeared.

Military units are subject to inspections. In the mid ‘90s Great Lakes had a UEI (Unit Effectiveness Inspection). An IG team descended upon Great Lakes…assessing and evaluating processes and performances. Their decree: Boot Camp was OUTSTANDING! Advanced Schools needed work….a LOT of work. But this report is not what convinced me of the value of process improvement.

A few years later, as the Navy sought to consolidate bases to save money, they took a look at their boot camps. They realized they only needed one base to provide basic training. But of Jacksonville, San Diego, or Chicago…which one to choose??They choose Chicago. Great Lakes Naval Training Center was selected to be the one boot camp.

Think of that…Chicago…in the winter…enlistees marching in sub-zero weather. But the program was so well run…so dedicated to quality, it was the best choice.?

That is the power of process improvement.