How government oversight adds time to contractor engineering work

Abstract

Oversight is necessary for evaluating the performance of contractors building complex systems for the U.S. government, but it can also result in additional program costs. In order to accurately measure the extent of these additional costs, stakeholders need to understand how oversightrequired activities add time to work. To that end, this paper presents the data from a qualitative research study to investigate how oversight adds time to contractor engineering work at a major U.S. aerospace company. We observed that oversight activities require many tasks to complete, which can add cascades of new activities that are performed in multiple iterations. Oversight activities cannot be accounted for in a binary way-oversight adds time to parts of all activities that the contractor performs. We describe the mechanisms through which oversight impacts work by extending the time spent on all activities. Understanding how added time occurs could help both contractors and government program managers determine ways to reduce unnecessary costs. Implications of these findings for systems engineers interested in conducting studies to measure the impact of oversight are discussed. K E Y W O R D Sacquisition, oversight 54

A Case Study of the Decision-Making Behind the Automation of a Composites-Based Design Process

“…They must then process this information-sometimes creatively (Hsiao and Chou, 2004) -to decide on the product's form and function (Cyert and March, 1963). Designers are under time pressures to make these decisions: delays might hurt a product's commercial success or draw unwanted oversight, further complicating the development process (Brainard and Szajnfarber, 2019;Collopy and Hollingsworth, 2011). But designers must also make these decisions carefully, as revising design mistakes is costly (Chua and Hossain, 2011;Love, 2002).…”