Deployment Cycle Research Articles

Partnering in Support of War Zone Veterans and Their Families

CME Educational Objectives 1. Identify readjustment issues for war zone veterans and their families related to the deployment cycle. 2. Provide a rationale for Veterans Affairs/Department of Defense/State and Community Partnerships in support of returning war zone veterans and their families. 3. Identify potential partners and actions in providing support and mental health services for returning war zone veterans and their families.

Vermont: A Case History for Supporting National Guard Troops and Their Families

<p>The current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq present many challenges to service members and their families. The traditional military cycle of deployment exposes troops and their families to the tension and apprehension of predeployment anticipation; troops to the dangers of the war zone; families to the challenge of carrying on without the missing service member; and, finally, troops and their families with post-deployment reintegration. The reunion and reintegration phase can be especially problematic because the effects of deployment are complicated by the difficulty of picking up where things left off before their separation.</p> <h4>ABOUT THE AUTHORS</h4> <p>Laurie B. Slone, PhD, and Matthew H. Friedman, MD, PhD, are with the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; and the Department of Psychiatry, Dartmouth Medical School. Andrew S. Pomerantz, MD, is with VA Medical Center, White River Junction, Vermont; and the Department of Psychiatry, Dartmouth Medical School.</p> <p>Address correspondence to: Laurie Slone, PhD, 215 N. Main Street, 116-D, VA Medical Center, White River Junction, VT 05009; fax 802-295-5135; or e-mail <a href="mailto:Laurie.Slone@dartmouth.edu">Laurie.Slone@dartmouth.edu</a>.</p> <p>Dr. Slone and Dr. Pomerantz have disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Dr. Friedman has disclosed the following relevant financial relationship: AstraZeneca: Member of Speakers’ Bureau. </p>

International Military Leaders' Survey on Operational Stress

Despite the importance of military leaders in moderating the impact of deployment stressors on unit members, little attention has focused on the training leaders receive in managing unit stress. As part of a NATO Research Panel (Human Factors and Medicine (HFM)-081/Research and Technology Organization Task Group (RTG)), 16 nations participated in a needs assessment survey of military leaders who had returned from an operation within the previous 2 years. Findings from 172 leaders emphasized the lack of training specifically geared for leaders to address operational stress issues for unit members and their families and the need for integrated mental health support across the deployment cycle. In general, most leaders regarded stress-related mental health problems as normal and were supportive of help-seeking. The information obtained here was used to develop a Human Factors and Medicine -081/RTG Leader's Guide on operational stress.

Supporting Children and Adolescents with Deployed Caregivers: A Structured Group Approach for School Counselors

Children and adolescents of deployed soldiers require preventive and sometimes remedial service from school counselors, because deployment taxes coping skills and exacerbates normal developmental challenges. This article reviews the cultural and developmental context for children with deployed caregivers and outlines a ten session, hybrid psychoeducational-counseling group designed to increase student knowledge (e.g., emotional cycles of deployment), build student competencies (e.g., coping skills, mastery of developmental tasks), and promote a safe environment to express emotions with connected peers.

An overview of IBM Service Management

Information technology has become a key enabler for businesses in a wide variety of sectors (such as banking and health care) and is increasingly used to deliver their services. For these businesses, service excellence is increasingly a competitive differentiator, as customers need to rapidly adapt to changing conditions in the marketplace and create and deploy new services quickly and efficiently. However, service excellence can only be achieved through effective and efficient service management. IBM Service Management is an initiative to help businesses increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their services over the complete life cycle of service creation, deployment, and operations. IBM is bringing together the capabilities of its hardware, software, and consulting services organizations to help customers design, build, deploy, and manage these business services. IBM is also working closely with business partners and industry standards organizations to make this an industry-wide initiative. In this paper, we describe IBM Service Management and its role in improving all aspects of business services.

Re-Entry and Reintegration: Returning Home after Combat

Soldier life exists on a continuum of readiness for deployment. Re-entry and reintegration-the return home and reunion with family and community-key the success of the deployment cycle. In current and projected future operations, the Army and society will both bear the burden of this re-entry and re-integration. Programs and procedures in place work towards improving communication, mitigating distress and resolving crises during reentry and reintegration. Key elements include: inclusion of families and communities early into the planning for reentry and reintegration; normalization (non-medicalization of distress); easy access to behavioral health professionals; and education of families on resources and benefits. Through broad collaboration, maximal benefit to the Soldier, family members and society be realized.

Strategic evolution of eco-products: a product life cycle planning methodology

This paper presents a methodology and a software tool to establish an eco-design concept of a product and its life cycle by assigning appropriate life cycle options to the components of the product. The product life cycle planning (LCP) methodology provides the following systematic procedures. First, the medium- or long-term production and collection plan for the product family is clarified. Next, target values for the product and its life cycle are set in the process of determination of customer-oriented specification and eco-specification. Then, eco-solution ideas to realize reasonable resource circulation are generated by using various life cycle option analysis charts. Finally, an eco-design concept which involves eco-solution ideas is evaluated for decision-making at early stages of product development. A design support tool was made for efficiently planning product life cycles by using quality function deployment and life cycle assessment data. Based on case studies, it was verified that the proposed methodology and tool are useful for developing multi-generational eco-products.

Soldier Peer Mentoring Care and Support: Bringing Psychological Awareness to the Front

Since the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991, the operational tempo for soldiers has steadily increased, whereas the numbers of soldiers available to fulfill these missions has decreased. As a result, soldiers and their families are experiencing increased levels of stress that continue to manifest in ways that can often be destructive for the soldiers, their families, and the Army community. Current mitigation and identification support systems such as the Chain of Command, noncommissioned officer leadership, chaplains, and family support systems have all provided critical services, but may not be expected to optimally perform necessary early risk management assessment. Behavioral health care as a self-referral system is often still perceived as career ending, shameful, or even culturally unacceptable. Our allies have also experienced similar family, operational, and combat concerns. In 1996, at the direction of their Commandant General, the British Royal Marines developed and instituted a peer-driven risk management and support system that has experienced a high degree of success and acceptance among its forces-enough so that the Royal Navy is now in the process of implementing a similar program. The Soldier Peer Mentoring and Support program, as part of the proposed deployment Cycle Support Program, is a model for peer group assessment based on the British Royal Marines psychological risk management and support system. This article presents and describes this project, which has been considered for use within the U.S. Army, as a potential augmenter of existing behavioral health support assets as a culturally acceptable, company-level support program in deployment and home stations.

Product Redesign Using Value-Oriented Life Cycle Costing

A new redesign approach has been developed considering the perspective of a designer who wants to improve product performance over the whole life-cycle while simultaneously optimising costs. Product components can be identified which incur high costs compared to their functional value. In order to identify the optimisation potential, the methods of Value Analysis, Quality Function Deployment and Life Cycle Costing have been matched to each other and integrated into a comprehensive concept. Based on a case study of vehicles, this paper explains the theoretical approach and analyses for designers to optimise costs and conduct product redesign by using Value-Oriented Life Cycle Costing.

Remote computing using the National Fusion Grid

The National Fusion Collaboratory (http://www.fusiongrid.org) uses grid technology to implement remote computing on the National Fusion Grid. The motivations are to reduce the cost of computing resources, shorten the software deployment cycle, and simplify remote computing for the user community. The National Fusion Collaboratory has successfully demonstrated remote access as a grid service to the TRANSP transport analysis code for tokamak experiments. TRANSP development and administration are now centralized at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), obviating both the need to port TRANSP to different platforms and the process of deploying TRANSP to remote sites. TRANSP users now share the resources of a powerful Linux cluster located at PPPL. Fusion researchers have completed over 900 TRANSP runs utilizing over 5600 h of CPU time since the TRANSP service was installed in October 2002.

Estimating the CPU utilization of a rule-based system

Rule-based software systems have become very common in telecommunications settings, particularly to monitor and control workflow management of large networks. At the same time, shorter deployment cycles are frequently necessary which has led to modifications being made to the rule base, without a full assessment of the impact of these new rules through extensive performance testing.An approach is presented that helps assess the performance of rule-based systems, in terms of its CPU utilization, by using modeling and analysis. A case study is presented applying this approach to a large rule-based system that is used to monitor a very large industrial telecommunications network.

Project Initium: Programmatic Deployment.

This paper describes the design and use of a Java Web Start framework called Initium. Initium generates a jar file that minimizes the number of included classes by performing a static class dependency analysis. It then prompts the programmer for security parameters that enable the programmatic signing of the jar file, for the purpose of authentication. Initium generates a local Java Network Launch Protocol file (JNLP file) for the purpose of testing, as well as a remote JNLP file, for deployment. Finally, Initium programmatically uploads both the JNLP and jar files to the web server, to complete the deployment cycle. The signing of a jar file enables web start clients to execute a Java application in a trusted and distributed manner. Trusted jar files can be executed outside of the “sandbox” and thus be given access to files, or be able to open connections to hosts other than the web host on the target system. Initium is a Latin word that means: “at the start”. It is part of an on-going project at both the DocJava Inc. skunk works and Fairfield University.

Delivering expected value to users and stakeholders with User Engineering

The success of a product or service depends on how well it is received by its intended audience. Usually success results from a systematic design process that involves the intended users. The user experience consists of how a product or service is perceived by users, and the goal is to make the experience consistent and supportive. User Engineering (UE) is an evolving discipline that focuses on designing the total user experience, from initial awareness and acquisition of a product or service--the offering--to first use, then day-to-day use, onward through the life cycle of the offering. UE goes well beyond User-Centered Design by adopting software engineering approaches and tools. It applies these approaches and tools rigorously through all phases of a project from its initiation through its design, development, deployment, and life cycle. Rigor is introduced through detailed definitions of roles, activities, work products, methods, and measures, with a specific focus on assessing business-oriented measures against established targets throughout the entire process. A multidisciplinary design team is necessary for UE to create the user experience in partnership with its intended users. This paper presents an overview of the fundamental concepts of the UE process, including an appreciation of the engineering-inspired rigor.

The national ignition facility

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) currently under construction at the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a 192-beam, 1.8-Megajoule, 500-Terawatt laser being built by the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) for inertial confinement fusion and high-energy-density experimental studies. The stadium-sized facility is currently activating systems for first light and will be completed in 2008.The facility is controlled by the Integrated Computer Control System (ICCS), a layered architecture of 300 front-end processors (FEP) coordinated by supervisor subsystems. The FEP's are distributed computers that interface to physical devices through VME-bus and PCI-bus crates. The functional subsystems - beam control including automatic beam alignment and wavefront correction, laser pulse generation and pre-amplification, diagnostics, pulse power, and shot timing - implement the actions of operators at eight graphic consoles, coordinate control, and display and archive data in a database. The software architecture mimics the hardware design levels: software devices in FEP's model hardware control points and supervisory objects model the line replaceable units that modularize the laser system. Graphic user interfaces are provided to make status and control of each level accessible to operators.The ICCS software is based on an object-oriented framework that incorporates services for archiving, machine configuration, graphical user interface, status monitoring, event logging, scripting, alert management, and access control. Software code development uses a mixed language environment of Ada (for functional controls) and Java (for user interface and database backend). CORBA is used to communicate between languages and processors. Substantial benefits credited to using Ada include the formality of controlled interfaces that rely on Ada's type model, easy-to-construct exception processing and the robustness of Ada's tasks.A strategy of incremental cycles of construction and formal test has been used since project inception. The project has completed more than 30 planned cycles of deployment into testbeds and is now integrating with the first 4 operational beamlines in the facility. Fifty of the planned 300 FEP's have been installed and tested with facility equipment. These implement nearly 200 classes that model physical control hardware - some 2500 software objects. Nearly all of the top-level functional subsystems, embodying some 110 application classes, have been commissioned in the facility. The integrated control system has successfully executed shots into test diagnostics in support of laser integration. The first coordinated facility shots to the 10-m diameter target chamber are expected in early 2003.Issues of robustness and scaling arise as the system integrates larger ensembles of control points and serves an increasing number of operators. The system comprises some 60 intercommunicating processes, and since none of these are known to be defect free, techniques for replacement and restart of individual processes are required. The most common communication pattern - publish and subscribe - is supported by a connection management framework that adds exception handlers to the ORB in order to restore broken connections and restart failed processes without explicit action by application client codes.This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No. W-7405-Eng-48.

Seeing Through the Fog—Attaining ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ with the System‐of‐Systems Through Operational Engineering

ABSTRACTMany discussions and articles address the business and military changes supporting implementation of Joint Vision 2010 and its system‐of‐systems approach. The dynamics of international military operations and commitments, coupled with accelerating information technologies, can lead to confusion and uncertainty. Customary rules recommend caution, even stopping, when confusion and uncertainty are present, yet the needed changes counsel toward accelerated efforts. Currently, systems engineering does not completely address delivering “operational war fighting capabilities,” or foster commanders' confidence to fully exploit those capabilities upon delivery.Acquisition reform supports accelerating delivery of systems. Likewise, accelerated delivery of “war fighting capabilities” within any opponents' fielding and deployment cycle is imperative. Technical advances in modeling and simulation, utilization concepts, and innovative evaluation methods create an opportunity to facilitate redevelopment of doctrine, operations, and training prior to producing hardware systems. On‐line simulation and evaluation tools can overcome the need for physical systems.Specifically, this paper lays out the opportunity to evolve systems engineering to another level, operational engineering, which leverages from the modeling and simulation environment, prior to hardware production. That modeling and simulation paired with coevolution of procedures and on‐line analysis will produce a trained customer base, fully prepared for deliveries of “operational war fighting capabilities”.

A simple decision model of counterproliferation

We develop a simple decision model of counterproliferation involving a status quo “incumbent” and a nuclear “entrant”. The problem is examined as a one-stage interaction in two phases: nuclear development and deployment. We examine the conditions that will influence the decision to move pre-emptively against a proliferator's nuclear program. Particular attention is given to the role of uncertainty in determining the expected costs of action at different points in the entrant's weapon's development and deployment cycle. The model permits us to determine the optimal time to act given varying levels of information concerning entrant behavior. In conclusion, we examine the tradeoffs between the expected costs of action and the costs of intelligence.

The Role of Senior Leaders in Driving Rapid Change

Once again, Eugene Nelson, Paul Batalden, Julie Mohr, and Stephen Plume are enlightening us with a view of the future healthcare improvement model. Long recognized as the leaders in process-level measurement, the experiences they share from the front lines of Dartmouth-Hitchcock have enabled many of us to reduce drastically deployment cycle times and the learning curves of our organizations. Here they share a practical healthcare application-new to me, at least-of Quinn's replicable unit concept (Quinn 1992). As presented, this approach, called the microunit approach, calls for the widespread deployment of strategic teams at the core process level; in the example presented, the team focuses on management of a managed care population. Facilitators aid the team in creating a master deployment plan, consisting of creation of an aim for the management of population, system map creation, strategic measurement tracking, selection of high-leverage subprocesses to improve, and deployment of its process improvement methodology. This concept is immediately appealing because it meets three of the most critical success factors proven to be present in successful strategic initiatives: rapid implementation cycles, strategic measures, and intense involvement of process owners as a team. Kaiser reported results using a similar approach to clinical guideline improvement in 1995 (Caldwell 1998). I have some significant experience with this approach: When I was CEO of West Paces Medical Center in Atlanta from 1986 through 1993, multidisciplinary disease-state teams were deployed using spider diagrams to track their strategic initiatives (Caldwell 1995). Nelson and Batalden were instrumental in helping to establish the core process boundaries, strategic spider diagrams, deployment of the FOCUS-PDCA process improvement model, and ongoing mentoring of team leadership. While beyond the scope of this commentary, our analysis revealed that many were enormously successful and others not so successful. What can we glean from the experiences of the authors in the deployment of microunit teams? Success Criteria for Microunit Team Deployment Importance of Replication as an Organizational Core Competency As Nelson et al. explain Quinn's concept, microunit teams are described as small, replicable units. A lesson I recall from Blan Godfrey, chairman of the Juran Institute, amplifies this point. During a review of strategic achievements at a global petroleum company, the president of one of the offshore subsidiaries proudly presented the results of an improvement project, which saved millions for the parent corporation. In his commentary to the team and senior leadership, Blan lamented with the proud president that he must be anguishing over his unit's success; the president, obviously shaken, simply looked on. Blan went on to explain that the burden on the offshore president to transfer and teach his colleagues around the globe so that the entire organization might save billions instead of just millions must be an overwhelming burden. The point is applicable here, as well. While the achievement of microunit rapid cycle improvements alone might help an organization outdistance its competition in both quality and cost, ultimate success of the organizations also rests on its ability to rapidly transfer and implement breakthroughs of each microunit team to all other teams in very short implementation cycles. The success of small replicable units could be said to be dependent on both factors. Multiunit Team Strategic Measures The authors highlight the importance of a unified, organizationwide set of external quality characteristics to measure success of microunit teams. They suggest price, choice, service quality, and outcomes quality. I choose to highlight these here because frequent, focused measurement is one of the cornerstones of every successful initiative I have observed. Nelson et al. have been pioneers in this area for years, and readers would benefit from reviewing and re-reviewing their past writings. …

LIFE CYCLE SYSTEMS ENGINEERING: A GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL IMPERATIVE

AbstractThe scope of systems engineering has rapidly expanded to encompass the full life cycle of system development, deployment and support. A number of important issues arise during the latter stages of this cycle related to the impact of a deployed system upon the biosphere. Such issues include health, safety, and environmental protection as well as recycling and resource conservation. This paper describes how the practice of Design for Environment can be incorporated into systems engineering, assuring that downstream environmental quality factors are incorporated into design trade‐off decisions.

Psychosocial and Life Stress Characteristics of Navy Families: Family Environment Scale and Life Experiences Scale Findings

This study examined the combined responses of husbands and wives within 785 Navy families on five subscales from the Moos and Moos (1981) Family Environment Scale (FES) and from the Life Experiences Scale (LES), a measure of life stress developed by Sarason, Johnson, and Siege1 (1978). Respondents were from the U.S. Navy Atlantic Submarine Fleet, Surface Fleet, Air Wing, and Shore Duty Commands. Major findings indicated that FES subscale means for Navy families compared favorably with national normative data reported by Moos and Moos (1981), and FES scores were not affected by the sailors' point in the deployment cycle or type of command assignment. In contrast, LES scores were significantly related to command assignment and point in the deployment cycle, with significantly lower levels of life stress reported for those sailors and wives assigned to shore duty. Finally, level of life stress was significantly related to family environment characteristics, with higher life stress families reporting lower levels on FES subscales of Cohesiveness, Expressiveness, and Organization, and higher levels on Family Conflict.

The Use of Closed Queues in the Deployment of Coal-Face Machinery

Expensive coal-face machinery is deployed to collieries from centralized pools. This paper describes a study of the deployment cycle of such equipment to determine what scope for improvement existed. A queueing model was used to establish the main factors affecting the system and this model enabled broad operating principles to be established. Further analysis was done using a simulation model, the salient features of which are described. The paper goes on to describe how the simulation model was used to lead to the conclusion that the complexity of the deployment cycle could be reduced to the consideration of two simple parameters.