Performance Measure Development Case Study

United States Coast Guard (USCG) - Integrated Deepwater System (IDS) Program

To continue to meet America’s 21st century maritime threats and challenges, the U.S. Coast Guard initiated the Integrated Deepwater System (IDS) Program, the largest and most innovative acquisition in the organization’s history. The IDS is not just “new ships and aircraft,” but an integrated approach to upgrading existing assets while transitioning to newer, more capable platforms with improved systems. In addition to being a large program based on its nearly billion-dollar budget, Deepwater is a performance-based acquisition, which makes it extremely complex in terms of monitoring, management, and oversight.

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is the primary management tool for Deepwater performance measurement and management. The APCG team has worked with Deepwater management to develop and implement valid performance measures, supported by verified data and management processes to help implement the BSC. This includes supporting the implementation of a sophisticated performance-measurement software tool that automates the Deepwater BSC. APCG continues to support the Coast Guard in ensuring that the BSC framework, measures, and use of associated software continue to evolve to support programmatic decision-making and to fulfill management and reporting requirements and objectives. Specifically, the APCG team has:

• Collaboratively developed expanded program-performance measures with subject matter experts throughout the program. These measures continue to enhance, augment, and refine the ongoing development of useful management measures within the BSC framework.
• Developed and delivered functional performance-measure systems training and orientation. This training is based on roles and responsibilities, developed by APCG, that ensure measure owners fully utilize the BSC and associated software tool in their management decision-making activities.
• Developed and implemented the BSC measure review process. The BSC Measure Review Process ensures that performance measures continue to satisfy the changing needs of the program and do not stagnate. At the same time, the process guards against haphazard changes that would render performance measures meaningless or burdensome to the management of the program.
• Developed performance measure scorecards for individual stakeholder groups. A diverse set of Deepwater stakeholder groups are interested in developing their own scorecards with their own focused, customized sets of measures within the Deepwater BSC framework. APCG is working with these stakeholder groups to develop customized and “cascaded” measures and scorecards that enhance program effectiveness and credibility by demonstrating Deepwater transparency and cooperation with its stakeholder constituencies.
• Developed a Data Acquisition and Management Process for performance measures in the Balanced Scorecard, along with an instruction manual, template, examples, and data plans for all data sources to institutionalize the process in the organization.