DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY PROGRAM ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION 700 ARMY PENTAGON WASHINGTON, DC 20310-0700 August 20, 2018 To the Army's Functional Area 49 (FA49) officers, Greetings to the Army s Operations Research/Systems Analysis (ORSA) Community! Over the past several years, we have provided a pseudo-state of the FA49 community and it was often a very long document because you are all doing great things. This year, I vowed to keep it shorter. I am using a summary from my recent remarks at the ORSA Q-course as a guide to put this letter together. While this letter is focused on the talent management of our military ORSA functional area, it should not take away from the great work being done by our over one thousand civilian ORSAs across the Army. It is this critical military and civilian partnership that enables us to help leaders make decisions. As I recently told the Majors at the Q-course, our functional area is in great shape and you continue to do incredibly important and relevant work. We (the senior ORSAs) envy those of you who are starting your ORSA journey, because we are convinced our best days are still in front of us. The reason for this is simple it is each and every one of you. You excel every day at doing what our commanders and leaders need from you you help them make difficult decisions. We are pleasantly surprised each year at the talent we bring in through the VTIP process and this is the reason for my optimism. Nothing is easy though and we will weather storms such as the occasional reduced promotion opportunities or reduction in billets. We are watching closely, but we may lose one of our two ORSA billets in the division headquarters. The Army s senior leaders have difficult decisions to make in how to fit the function of these headquarters into a cap in personnel, regardless of the decision, we will be fine. Strength of the Functional Area We are strong now, and despite our optimism, we should never rest on our accomplishments and instead need to have a sense that someone is chasing us so that we strive every day to become better. a. We continue to benefit from a large amount of brand equity that has been built up over the years. When you show up, folks have a mental image of an ORSA. Each of you benefit from what other ORSAs have done in the past. It is our job to further build and enhance our brand equity. b. Our core function is well understood. ORSAs help leaders make decisions. If there is a hard decision to be made and they ask for you you are doing well. c. We improve through crowd sourcing our talent management enterprise. We are talent-based, we have no CSL jobs. We invest heavily in training and education as a 1
basic bedrock of our talent management plan. But doing this requires your full participation, it does not happen by itself we need your sustained help. d. We assess through VTIP. If we make an error, nothing can be done to fix it. We need to ensure we assess enough quantity, quality, and breadth of skill sets. We need more logistics, intelligence, signal, and cyber basic branch officers. Our traditional source of aviators is slowing down as the Army grapples with pilot shortages. Your ORSA General Officers cold call potential ORSAs to help, we need you all to do the same. We had another very good year, with the two rounds of the VTIP now complete. We accessed forty-seven very talented officers. During this past year, we have worked with the recruiting committee and others to expand our outreach efforts, with the creation of the FA49blog.com, the public facing website FA49.army.mil and we have a few more volunteers to serve as local points of contact for VTIP applicants. All members of the FA49 community are recruiters, because everyone does their part to help us bring in new talent. Managing the Functional Area for our Military Manpower FA49 currently has 508 officers from the ranks of CPT through LTC and 427 authorizations. Due to the volume of officers in PME/Advanced Civil Schooling (14 percent equivalent to 84 officers) or on approved retirement, FA49 is short (for assignment purposes) 45 MAJ through LTC and has 36 CPTs in school or waiting their first assignment. These numbers do not include our 26 recent VTIP selects. We have 46 COL billets, but our success has led to having over 80 FA49 COLs. My priority of fill for assignments is: a. Down-range Billets: These ORSAs support Soldiers, our most important and primary function. We need help here. We recently have had short-noticed WIAS deployments because we are getting non-concurs from the losing commands. The Army will eventually fill the WIAS, but what happens is our ORSA officer gets very little notice. We need you all to help and take these on. What would be most helpful is if your organization can adopt a WIAS and provide the manpower over time. We have to do better here for our warfighter and for our officers. b. Division and Corps ORSAs: These ORSAs directly support the warfighter and build our reputation with the Army s future senior leaders. We handpick these Majors. Please help in identifying the most promising young officers for these assignments. If we get reduced to one ORSA in the divisions, picking the right person will be even more important. 2
c. Island ORSAs : ORSAs in small groups (usually two to four) at organizations such as ARCYBER, AMC, NETCOM, DIA, etc. A shortage here translates into a huge decrease in capacity so we try not to shortfall these assignments. e. Institutional ORSAs: We have larger concentrations of ORSAs at places like TRADOC Analysis Center (TRAC), Center for Army Analysis (CAA), Recruiting Command (USAREC), etc. We are willing to accept some risk with institutional ORSAs in these assignments and man them at only 70% to ensure other priorities are filled. The solution to fully manning these billets is a higher level of VTIP (and we are working on it). This is the price we pay to invest in the education of our officers. I personally want to thank these organizations for working with us and also for working cooperative degree programs that allow us to assign officers to these larger organizations and then help them get their degrees. We simply would not be successful without this level of support from TRAC, CAA, USAREC, and others. These organizations also feel the greatest impact of WIAS taskers, so again, thanks. Promotion Results Our ORSAs continue to get promoted above or near the Army and our Competitive Category averages, but over the past year, our statistics were not as good as in past years. Part of the reason was we had several high performers retire, had they not retired, we are certain we would have had higher promotion rates. a. Major: The FY17 FA49 primary zone (PZ) promotion rate to MAJ was 87.5 percent, above the Army average of 72.2 percent, and 81.1 percent for our competitive category with 35 of 40 selected. b. LTC: The FY18 FA49 LTC PZ had one BZ selection, 24 of 39 selected PZ (61.5 percent), and 3 selected AZ. The Army average for selection to LTC was 70.3 percent and we fell below our competitive category at 67.4 percent. c. Colonel: To the grade of Colonel in FY18, FA49 had no BZ promotions, 11 of 23 were selected PZ (47.8 percent) and 1 selected AZ. The Army average for selection to COL was 54.4 percent and we were above our competitive category at 45.8 percent. Boards promote based upon performance and potential and FA49 officers perform very well. We do not have designated key billets and we do not participate in the Centralized Selection List process. This is by design as it gives us enormous flexibility in how you 3
are assigned. What matters is how well you do in that job and, even more important, how you demonstrate potential for future, more difficult assignments. Every job you are assigned is important; do it well, and the Army will recognize your performance. There is no standard pathway to success for an ORSA. Do well in whatever job you get. As you move up, you will start relying on other skills and not as heavily on technical skills. We expect senior leaders to do the following: 1) lead change in your organization, 2) develop other leaders, and 3) spend more time outside of your organization, building a team. We have a remarkably high rate of selection for above the zone promotions and a relatively low rate of promotion below the zone. We believe the reason for this is that because we spend time in school as a Major, we don t have enough OERs for the board to consider. If you are passed over for promotion, the proponent team will help you review your file; a subsequently very strong OER can push you over the top in the next board. Expanding our Reach Over the past few years, we have placed ORSAs in some key areas where our capabilities are needed. We have volunteered ORSAs to build cells in the Intel, Cyber, Logistics, and other communities to ensure we remain relevant, but we only control people and not spaces. As commanders like what we send, we tell them that maintaining the position requires flipping a billet and many of them do, often giving up a key position for a permanent ORSA. As a result, FA49 branch has grown while the Army was downsizing. This is akin to Eric Ries Inkblot Strategy in The Lean Startup. An exciting opportunity in front us is Army Futures Command. The leadership of the AFC has openly stated that the command will be data-enabled and with TRAC and AMSAA now part of that command, they will need to rely heavily on our community to make that happen both military and civilian. It s a sea change and a huge opportunity for our community to impact the materiel acquisition, concept development, and requirements development processes. As you are reading this, TRAC and AMSAA ORSAs (both military and civilian) are literally leading the way to rewrite antiquated processes. I recently read Work Rules, by Lazlo Bock about insights from Google. On page 271, he states people who stand near the holes in social structures are at a higher risk of having good ideas. I immediately thought of our functional area, because that in a sense is what we do. We don t own programs, we come together with others who do in order to solve problems. If you have time, it is a good book to read. Another book that I recommend is American Icon, by Bryce Hoffman. In this book, Bryce outlines the effort to save Ford Motors by the CEO Alan Mulally. Throughout the book, but particularly in chapter 5, Bryce discusses how Alan Mulally used data and data visualization to drive 4
change. This parallels our assessment capabilities and is another reason we need to remain strong in that area. As Alan Mulally says on page 102, the data sets you free. Continuing Education and Certification One of our challenges is maintaining our intellectual capital. At any given time we have ~15% of our branch in Advanced Civil Schooling or Training with Industry. We need to stay relevant. Your degree is only an entry point. On-line courses, seminars, and correspondence will help you enhance your skill sets. We are the Data Scientists of the Army (and also Machine Learning Experts) We are working on a Personnel Development Skill Identifier (PDSI) so that we can identify and track those with Data Science skills. To earn it, you will need to be able to program. Big data is here now. Train yourself in a language (R, Python, etc.). The PDSI will not be exclusive to ORSAs, but we need to own this space through competence and quantity. We need diversity of skills. We are not worried about too much emphasis on data science, but we are worried about meeting the current and future demand. As the Army moves into artificial intelligence and machine learning, we are getting many calls to provide ORSA s to jump start these initiatives. Several of our teammates are on the cutting edge of these new fields, if you want to work with them, seek them out. Opportunities to Change the Future Many of the opportunities we have in the next few years are not directly related to how we manage our talent, but instead, on how we apply our tradecraft. Some may view these as challenges, I prefer to think of them as opportunities to shape the future. Several of you will be entrepreneurial and figure out how we take advantage of the cloud, the open source environment, big data, and algorithms. a. The Cloud: What tools should analysts have and how can we get access to cutting edge software tools on our DoD computer network? Many of these tools can be placed into the cloud and shared across organizations, this is a huge opportunity if we choose to take advantage of the power of the cloud. b. Open Source: How do we learn from each other, proliferate lessons learned, and share our work? This is often more about changing culture because many of the tools to share already exist. c. Big Data: As big data becomes ever more important to the work we do, what goes into a data strategy? As the consumers of big data, many of you will be 5
able to influence the data strategy that will enable our use of this information. Also, when the term big data is used, they really do mean BIG data. Often times no single organization will have enough data, so how do we consolidate efforts and make sure we tag once and use often. d. Algorithms: Artificial intelligence and machine learning rely on math, programming, data engineering, network engineering, and functional expertise, so how do we assemble a team with those skills? As a community, we must become the experts in not just understanding how the algorithms work, but how to put together the team to make the algorithms work properly. We cannot continue to pay contractors to write our algorithms, collect our data, and then pay again to use them, then at the end of all of it, not even understand how the algorithm worked. You Will Create Our Future Once again, we firmly believe that our best days are in front of us and for us to continue to excel we must lead, not just embrace, change. Do what is best for our Soldiers and not a particular organization. Don t let the bureaucracy win. Do not accept something if it s not right. Drive change. Keep doing great work and thanks again. 8/20/2018 X Digitally Signed John G Ferrari Signed by: FERRARI.JOHN.GEORGE.1026422155 JOHN G. FERRARI Major General, U.S. Army FA49 Executive Agent 6