Creating Organizational Change: Minimizing Client Generated Construction Inefficiencies at the US Army Medical Command

Abstract

The United States Army Corps of Engineers (COE) and Army Medical Command (MEDCOM) work in tandem to meet the hospital construction requirements for military bases located across the country. Over the past three years, MEDCOM has partnered with the authors to increase the efficiency of their construction delivery system through the research and testing of a new performance information environment. The objective of the research is to create an organizational structure and performance reporting platform that minimizes the need for decision making by the Director of MEDCOM. If the performance information environment can generate clear, timely, accurate, and dominant information, the need for decisions will be reduced, as the data will drive organizational operations and become self-regulatory. To date, the information has allowed an increase of contract performance from an average of 25% on-time and on-budget, to a current average of 40% on-time and 67% on-budget. This paper documents the hurdles and impacts, based upon a three year research effort, of implementing an automated technology for collecting and tabulating performance metrics, to create and sustain an information environment. Past literature has also shown that some 80% of organization change fails, the key finding of this paper is that performance information can be used to drive organization change and culture adjustment to create a sustained efficiency improvement in a large bureaucratic entity.