U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff honors AFCEC Activity Integration Team

  • Published
  • By Steve Warns
  • AFCEC Public Affairs
JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-LACKLAND, Texas --  The U.S. Air Force Civil Engineer Center's Activity Integration Team recently received honors as the second runner-up for the 2014 Chief of Staff Team Excellence Award.

The team's efforts contributed to a combined first-year savings of $260 million to the U.S. Air Force. But according to Capt. Graham Auten, chief civil engineer for CGO assignments and former member of the award-winning team, the effect goes beyond cost savings.

"It's just the beginning of a larger set of efforts," said Auten, installation investment program manager during the project. "The Air Force civil engineer world is culturally different today than when we started this whole process. Data is a resource, and we have to continue to invest in that data, and inform senior leadership that our whole reason for being is to make better decisions for the Air Force."

Twenty teams competed for the CSTEA with the goals of enhancing mission capability, improving mission capability and ensuring sustained results.
Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center Commander Maj. Gen. Theresa Carter honored the team April 1 with all 25 members of the team receiving her Commander's Coin.

"Certainly the work this team did applies across the rest of our enterprise," Carter said. "Hopefully, we can infuse some of that thinking and some of that problem-solving approach to other things we do and other areas across AFCEC."

Former Capt. Lindsey Maddox, the project's installation investment program manager prior to Auten, said Carter, in 2013 as the Air Force Civil Engineer, encouraged the use of a systematic approach to challenge the status quo.

"When we came to this in summer 2013, each program (sustainment, restoration, modernization, demolition and housing) was prioritized and separately funded," said Maddox. "Rather than prioritize it separately, it was General Carter who challenged us to say 'put this on one integrated list.' That way, we can determine what project could truly be funded next."

The team constructed a model using data gathered from installations. In order to make data gathering worthwhile for engineer squadrons, they tied it to funding, said AFIMSC Installation Support Director David Dentino, AFCEC Activity Integration Division chief during the project.

"First of all, you have to train them on how to get it, then you have to convince them that it's worth their investment to spend the time to do it," Dentino said. "This has to come at a cost of something else. This is why it was important for us to tie the data to money. If you don't get your data, you don't get your money."

Capt. Brennan Howell, in charge of emergent requirements during the project, compared it to car maintenance in terms of prioritizing the data.

"It's one that's always made sense for me," said Howell, program manager for strategic design and construction for AFCEC. "Maybe it's not necessarily changing the oil on my car but there are multiple maintenance items on the vehicle. Which one should you put your dollar into first and should it be that car?

"The whole point of all of this was to tie requirements' data to gathering money so that we could have a better idea of what our requirements were," he said.

Another objective of the team was determining the predictability and driving consistency into the funding, Dentino said.

"When we started this, nobody looked further than nine to 12 months into the future," Dentino said. "The first thing we did is expanded that time horizon to 24 months, and what Brennan was working on was to expand it out to 72 months."

What the team was able to do, Dentino said, was qualify and quantify the data.

"There's a lot of competing priorities," he said. "What it comes down to is justify to us what you're going to spend your money on. We have a tendency to say, 'Ugh, bad stuff is going to happen. If you don't give us your money, things will break, facilities will break.'

"What these guys were working on was doing exactly that - quantifying and qualifying it, so that when they say what's going to break, we could say, 'We have 200 roofs across the Air Force that have reached their useful life, and we have facilities assessment data that could confirm that for you.'"

While obtaining data was difficult and is still challenging, Maddox said an important point to the funding prioritization was being able to explain the risk.

"In order to compare these things that really don't seem similar at all (such as an environmental permit against a runway project against a facility renovation), we had to try and find some common values to score everything and compare everything," Maddox said. "Air Force Operational Risk Management always talks about a risk to Airmen, risk to (the) mission and the likelihood of that happening. Our model looked at the probability of that system, or that runway, or that permit or that environmental issue happening or failing and the consequence to the Air Force or our Airmen if that does happen."