Troika Solutions recently completed a six month project that developed policy, strategy, and supporting artifacts to establish an enterprise business management approach for the Marine Corps’ Business Mission Area (BMA) Lead. The Marine Corps began the transition to an improved and modernized business management capability with the realignment of the BMA Lead to the Deputy Commandant for Programs and Resources (DC P&R). This was done to provide a more effective enterprise perspective for business capabilities.
The tipping point of this transition is the introduction of a modernized, disciplined enterprise approach that the Marine Corps’ BMA Lead describes as Program Portfolio Management (PPM). PPM is an investment and management approach for a collective of portfolios. The Marine Corps BMA is a collective of five functional area portfolios: Human Resources, Financial Management, Logistics, Acquisition, and Training and Readiness. PPM provides the integration of business aspects such as business architecture and process, human capital, information technology, data management, and risk management across the functional area portfolios to ensure that business investments effectively and efficiently support operational capabilities.
The DoD’s Agency Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2015-2018 makes clear the need for such an approach. “Improving the processes that drive the Defense institution helps the DoD to better understand the costs and risks associated with mission outcomes. Instilling a strong cost culture across the DoD is critical to enabling the Business Mission Area to deliver value to the warfighter. Knowing what it costs to deliver business capabilities allows DoD leaders to assess the return on investment leading to improved decision making across the organization.”
Troika was supported in the BMA PPM project by srcLogic, and IBM’s Global Business Services. As a result of the project, DC P&R, as the BMA Lead, will be able to use PPM as the means to gain and maintain awareness of process performance and business value of the functional portfolios. This generates improved readiness and identifies reinvestment opportunities to support the best application of limited resources necessary to create and maintain the most effective and suitable force possible.
The project’s deliverables provide an integrated approach to ensure that business capability investments are aligned to Marine Corps strategic mission goals and objections. The core of the project’s strategy is the integration of the business aspects with the BMA and its five functional areas. The strategy is supported by organizational and functional operating concepts, and key considerations for modernization, reform, and transformation.[PR1][JM2]The approach establishes business process management as foundational for modernization, reform and transformation, and posits the roles, responsibilities, and relationships, the resourcing, assessment, and services to support a modernized BMA. As proof points, reference implementations and demonstrations were conducted in key focus areas.
The organizational operating concept designed by the Troika team focuses on synchronizing an array of governance boards and responsibilities for investment decision making to include:
Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Performance Improvement Strategic Prioritization
Capability Portfolio Management
Business Reform
IT Portfolio Management
The functional operating concept focuses on integrating an array of institutional processes and procedures related to investment accounting, assessment, prioritization, and decision making. These include:
Capital Planning and Investment Control (CPIC) process
Business Capability Acquisition Cycle (BCAC) process
Internal Controls Program
Planning, Programming, Execution, and Budget (PPBE) process
Specific project deliverables included:
Developing Technical Reference Architecture documentation
Establishing a Human Capital Management Strategy with a Financial Management reference implementation
Exploiting Business Process Modeling to automate the Manager’s Internal Control Program (MICP)
Proposing a Financial Resourcing Strategy
Executing a detailed Table of Organization (T/O) analysis for the financial management community of interest
Instilling a PPM approach and culture is critical to enabling the BMA to collectively deliver value to the warfighter. In developing the specifics of PPM for DC P&R, the Troika team developed an integration strategy, that communicates the need for PPM and the depth of what needs to be implemented to modernize Service-level business practices, achieve improved fiscal efficiencies and, ultimately, and to ensure that business investments contribute to the operational effectiveness of the force.
As a result of the BMA PPM project, DC P&R has a PPM strategy that provides the means for the BMA to more effectively interact with the Marine Corps’ capabilities based assessment (CBA) process. This leads to knowing what it costs to deliver business capabilities and allowing leaders to assess the return on investment, leading to improved decision making across the organization. Ultimately, the Troika PPM strategy allows the BMA to more effectively and efficiently support operational capabilities.
To learn more about this project, please contact Troika's CEO, Ken Lasure by emailing info@troikasol.com.