USS Boise is the Poster Child for the Failure of the US Navy’s Perform-to-Plan (P2P) Process
Chris Trost, PE, PMP
Program Management & Engineering Executive | Collaborative Leader | Complex Problem Solver | Project Physics approach to Performance Improvement
The USS Boise (SSN 764) saga of a nuclear submarine being tied to the pier for 8-years and counting is the result of the Navy’s use of the wrong metrics and a lack of accountability across the stakeholders involved – fleet, shipyards, supply, contracting and technical communities.?The USS Boise was originally planned to enter Norfolk Naval Shipyard as a Fiscal Year 2015 (FY15) Engineered Overhaul (EOH or “availability”).?Navy leadership made a misguided policy change in 2015-2016 to make depot maintenance schedule performance the primary metric to synchronize maintenance stakeholders and improve performance.?This led to the establishment of the VCNO’s Perform to Plan (P2P) process and the Naval Sustainment System (NSS) initiative to improve depot maintenance performance for aircraft, ships and submarines.?USS Boise became the poster child for the policy change as described by VADM Moore:
“We had Boise this summer that we were going to induct into Norfolk Naval Shipyard. The shipyard said the availability, which would typically take 24 months, was going to take 47 months because it didn’t have the capacity.” “So in the old days we would have stuffed it in there, we would have kept it in there for 47 months without the work capacity to get it done, and today at least we made the rational decision, we’re not going to put it into the yard if we don’t have the capacity to get the work done.” – VADM Tom Moore, COMNAVSEA, September 2016[1]
Late completion of submarine depot availabilities has been common since at least the 1980s.?The GAO reported that only 5 of 33 availabilities finished on schedule between 2015-2019 and 688 Class availabilities finished late by 20% or more on average over the year during 17 of 22 years from 1984-2006 as shown in Figure 1.?Overruns of 80% or more occur periodically, such as USS Jacksonville (SSN 699) FY89 in the 1990s and USS Connecticut (SSN 22) FY12 in 2010s, largely due to being assigned to overloaded shipyards.
VADM Moore explicitly elevated performance to an arbitrary plan (i.e. 24 month target for a 688 Class EDSRA from the Class Maintenance Plan) over both the value of a nuclear submarine to the fleet and the throughput capacity of the shipyards!?If USS Boise had gone into the shipyard in 2016 it would be an operational fleet asset today, even with a significant overrun beyond the 47-month estimate.?The shipyard would have generated more maintenance throughput over that time by having tasks available for any underutilized resources. The critical elements that were missed then and remain unaddressed today are 1) the connection of “the plan” to the throughput capacity of the depot facilities and 2) the alignment of all maintenance stakeholders on achieving throughput.?These elements are used across industries when assessing tradeoffs between service life, maintenance, and operational availability of high-value assets.[2]?The VIRGINIA Class program office identified the notional schedule issues 5-years before the Boise decision.?The actual availability schedule depends on the individual shipyard, its workload and other conditions experienced during execution.[3]?The Navy has many levers that can be pulled to increase shipyard productivity, throughput and ultimately capacity with many of those controlled outside the shipyard.[4] ?P2P as currently constituted is not one of them.? As W. Edwards Deming put it: “every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets”.
Call to Action:
To increase production throughput, all stakeholders must be aligned on and held accountable for the same metric: ?depot maintenance throughput.?The throughput requirement is a function of the number of ships, the class maintenance plans and the corrective and deferred maintenance backlogs.?Achieving operational availability and service life of each ship requires a specific amount of depot throughput to be completed per week.?All stakeholders must then deliver their part of that requirement and be held accountable if they don’t.?The Navy today does not know the total throughput requirement, much less what it is for each shipyard.
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Once the throughput needed is known, the shortfall by facility guides the actions to increase capacity through the process that has been part of industry since Henry Ford:?identify the constraints, increase the capacity of the constraints, re-evaluate and repeat.?In our engagements, commercial industry is typically able to accelerate production by 20-50% or more in a short period of time and without capital investment by focusing on throughput.?Most local improvements (i.e. improving performance in a shop) do not translate to increased throughput of depot availabilities and are largely wasted efforts.?Alignment on throughput highlights the constraints and provides both the priority and business case for making policy changes and/or capital investments.?Proof that the Navy can do it is readily available in Ohio Class Submarines and the Trident Refit Facilities.?The readiness requirement (patrols) has been met for 40 years while the service lives of the boats have been extended.?Tracking schedule performance, “lost-days”, and unmet combatant commander requests have not delivered readiness as clearly shown by USS Boise.?How many more boats need to be tied up at the pier to recognize the problem and make the change?
[1] NAVSEA Commander’s Intent: Complete Ship Maintenance On Time, USNI News, Sept. 14, 2016, by Megan Eckstein
[2] Malone, Michael, et.al. “Maximizing Value Across the Lifecycle of Long-Lived Capital-Intensive Assets”. Naval Engineer’s Journal. September 2014. p. 67-79..
[3] Goff, Christy et.al.?Maximizing Platform Value: Increasing VIRGINIA Class Deployments.?Naval Engineers Journal.?Sept. 2011. P. 119-139
[4] Price, Joseph, et.al. “Productivity Management Insights and Lessons from Naval Ship Repair”. Naval Engineer’s Journal.?June 2021. p. 77-90.
Social Scientist
1 年That sounds a lot like BPMP, Tom. Testing probably has the least schedule elasticity so focus optimization on what comes before. Lots of details and interactions that impact QAC aren’t captured by “apply the labor to achieve the desired QAC throughput” approach. I agree that “Earned Value does not manage the critical path.” QAC is just a part of EV, a gross indicator of manning sufficiency and whether you had a decent plan to start.
Independent Consultant
1 年Gentlemen may I offer another component to the maintenance failure, that started when the Navy decided that sailors would only be operators and not maintainers. This was done under the umbrella of quality of life but the cost was a lack of ownership for the condition of the vessel. The Navy and the other services have also dumbed down requirements and reduced maintenance training for the rates that historically provided the TLC for their ship home. No matter how skilled civilian workers don't spend deployments on the vessel and thus do not have the drive and dedication to fight the ship and stay alive. Without the ownership and the "skin in the game" of being in harms way its only money. That vessel is either the sailors deliverer of coffin in war. Are you sending your children in harms way?
JetBlue First Officer and owner Lyons Creek Aviation and Consulting
1 年I’m pleased to see that we are at least talking about this problem. As a CVN guy myself, I have to admit that SSNs are still our biggest advantage in a pacific engagement with a peer adversary, and maintenance of that advantage may well be our most effective deterrent to war over there. If I’m a Chinese naval officer, I’m going to be taking a big, anxious gulp as I head across the strait, wondering when the mark 48 is going to come. I continue to maintain that throughput is constrained by the Human Resources we have that can do SUBSAFE work. As Ralph states, there are no idiots involved in this business. But when you only have so many folks that can do hull inspections, or weld repairs of same, for example (one of MANY examples), and you have multiple hulls in yard, one of the hulls gets sacrificed. I watched (and condoned) it as we first completed HELENA, then on to COLUMBUS, and lastly BOISE. BOISE will not get any appreciable work done until COLUMBUS is done. And that’s because there aren’t enough SUBSAFE folks to do two boats at once. Hiring has been going on for 3 years plus. We need to make this work attractive. And look at me…I don’t want to do it either.
Social Scientist
1 年Either “the people in charge” (a dubious concept in ship maintenance due to all the moving parts) can’t do the math, OR as my mentor Tom Williams noted, you could consider the incentives at work. Having worked inside the black box of ship maintenance, construction, lifecycle costs, and budgets for decades, I can assure you that very few of the people involved were idiots and all of them could do the math you suggest. Your options are limited if you don’t get to invent a really long screwdriver or can’t “lift up the hood and fix what’s wrong.”