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Smooth Moves: Helping Military Families Transition to New Homes September 2009
From Ft. Hood, Texas, to Stuttgart, Germany, military families are constantly on the move, as service members are deployed across the country and throughout the world. Typically, their household possessions, from prized furniture to carefully packed boxes of holiday decorations, are waiting for them upon their arrival at their new location. But there are also situations where shipments are late, goods are damaged, and cherished items simply become lost. To shift over half a million personnel and their families around the world as smoothly as possible each year, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) uses military transportation offices, but also must contract with a large number of commercial moving companies. It's a massive logistical undertaking, especially because virtually no two move scenarios are alike. Meanwhile, the success (or failure) of a move can have a tremendous impact on the morale of soldiers and civilians. Two years ago, a Congressional investigation revealed that the overall quality of the moving service for military service members and DoD civilians was subpar. "Maintaining the hardware and software systems, which were created to manage personnel property moves, was expensive, and they were quickly becoming obsolete," explains Doug Beauvais, a principal information systems engineer at MITRE. The U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) is responsible for the moving arrangement known as the Defense Personal Property System (DPS). USTRANSCOM asked MITRE, with which it already had a working relationship, to examine the program to conclude whether the existing systems could be salvaged—or if not, to help formulate an improved way ahead. "We determined that what needed to be done was to collapse many systems into one overall, centralized system," Beauvais says. "A multitude of existing information management configurations was standing in the way of seamless property moves." As a result of the assessment, the sponsor asked MITRE to bring systems engineering support to the program. (Systems engineering refers to taking a broad view of large, complex systems by building effective, efficient networks of individual systems that meet the goals of the entire enterprise.) "The program needed a way to get a successful deployment," notes Katherine Heise, a MITRE engineer who served as technical advisor to the program manager. "We were able to bring skills to the project that the sponsor did not possess at the time." Shrinking the Web Throughout the four services—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines—and the U.S. Coast Guard, there are over 500,000 personnel property shipments annually to a wide range of destinations, which makes the DPS an extremely complex endeavor. "This is a high-visibility program with Congressional oversight, so failure was not an option for us," Beauvais says. "And, because this program directly impacts the quality of life for service members and their families, it's a high priority for the DoD—the aim is to make moves as stress-free as possible." "Our challenge was to architect a single, standardized, worldwide, Web-based personal property movement system," Heise points out. "And another requirement was to streamline the claims process for loss or damage incurred during a move." With those hurdles ahead of them, a team of eight MITRE engineers came together from across the corporation to pool their technical expertise in program engineering, systems engineering best practices, and IT architectures to create cutting-edge, cost efficient technology. "To retire one major legacy system, we had to come up with an architectural design to 'virtualize' it," Heise says. "'Virtualizing' means we placed various independent servers into one centralized system." This required an intricate systems engineering design. Heise collaborated with a MITRE architecture design expert, John Rusnak, to revamp the DPS technical architecture, instituting a Web-based system of shipment management. "We helped the sponsor shrink the system from 123 servers down to eight, with only one interface between them," Heise notes. "This integrated the information management process tremendously." Beauvais, who oversaw the program testing, brought in security systems support and other specific engineering know-how from MITRE and applied it to the challenges. "We had to keep strings of the various aspects of the system untangled," he says. "For example, we had security development taking place in concert with network monitoring. We had already been applying this kind of expertise to other programs for the sponsor, such as its acquisition methodology." The MITRE team developed and instituted a formal program to bring testing rigor to property moves. The tests showed the program manager where system risks lie, and how to mitigate those risks from an engineering perspective. Goods to Go Shortly after the redesign and testing of the new, integrated structure, the U.S. Air Force's Chief of Staff directed all Air Force personnel property offices to start using the new DPS. As a result, military and civilian personnel have already benefitted from the fully integrated system. Live operations at initial sites began in 2008, and it became available internationally in February 2009. "The system has awarded 50,000 shipments to movers, and 113 out of 123 locations worldwide are now using it," says Heise. The quality of service has improved, the number of claims has been reduced, and the claims process itself has been streamlined. The ultimate mission of the DPS is to earn smiles all around from satisfied families who experienced a straightforward, trouble-free move—a transition that still lets kids quickly find their well-worn baseball gloves and adults their dishes in time for preparing the evening's meal. —by Cheryl Scaparrotta Related Information Articles and News
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