The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Civilian Acquisition Workforce Personnel Demonstration Project (AcqDemo) is an effort to reengineer the civilian personnel system to meet the needs of the acquisition workforce and to facilitate the fulfillment of the DoD acquisition mission. Congress required independent assessment of the program against 12 criteria by September 30, 2012. This report is that legislatively mandated assessment.

An Assessment of the Civilian Acquisition Workforce Personnel Demonstration Project

Laura Werber, Lindsay Daugherty, Edward G. Keating, Matthew Hoover

ResearchPublished Oct 11, 2012

The vast majority of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and federal civilian employees work on the General Schedule (GS) personnel system. However, some concerns have been raised about the GS system, including perceptions that poorly performing employees are tolerated for extended periods of time and that monetary rewards are not directly linked to performance. In response to concerns of this nature, Congress has authorized some demonstration projects, in which additional flexibilities are provided, intending to produce better outcomes than if the employees were in the GS system. One such demonstration project, the DoD Civilian Acquisition Workforce Personnel Demonstration Project (AcqDemo), is the subject of this report. Implemented on February 7, 1999, AcqDemo is an effort to reengineer the civilian personnel system to meet the needs of the acquisition workforce and to facilitate the fulfillment of the DoD acquisition mission. Congress required an independent assessment of the program against 12 criteria by September 30, 2012. This report is that legislatively mandated assessment.

Key Takeaways

After Almost Quintupling in Size in 2011, Available Evidence Suggests That AcqDemo Is Faring Well in Terms of Many of the Criteria Specified in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011

  • AcqDemo clearly adheres to DoD policies with respect to veterans' preferences.
  • The AcqDemo Program Office has embarked on an extensive training program.
  • Employee feedback has been solicited through multiple mechanisms.
  • Interview and survey data suggest that many aspects of AcqDemo are positively perceived.
  • However, the perceived complexity of AcqDemo's personnel evaluation system has been a longstanding concern, though these concerns are partially mitigated by the fact that the AcqDemo workforce is generally well educated and sophisticated.
  • Barriers that affect the ability for employees to be rewarded for their contributions, such as constrained budgets and pay band ceilings, present challenges.

Recommendations

  • The congressional mandate to reevaluate AcqDemo in 2016 offers an opportunity to address limitations encountered in this study.
  • The AcqDemo Program Office should facilitate collection and analysis of objective data and interviews and clarify the concept of "mission needs."
  • In the future, it may be more productive to administer the survey to a stratified random sample of AcqDemo's employees rather than seek responses from the entire population. In addition, as AcqDemo expands to include employees from all the military services and additional DoD components, the comparison group should be revised to ensure that it serves as a useful referent group. Lastly, the survey could be expanded to include items that have been scientifically validated and used across multiple workplaces.
  • Although a randomized control trial is less feasible than other options in this context, other well-regarded evaluation methods could be employed in the future. For example, a pretest-posttest comparison-group strategy could be used with new organizations entering AcqDemo. In addition, by including a comparison group in its 2012 survey, the AcqDemo Program Office has already made use of another recommended technique, a nonequivalent group design. Finally, future evaluations could incorporate propensity score matching to create a comparison group for career progression-focused analysis.
  • The criteria by which the AcqDemo program is evaluated should be reassessed for 2016. The evaluation criteria should include both process and outcome measures for each of AcqDemo's key elements.

Topics

Document Details

  • Copyright: RAND Corporation
  • Availability: Web Only
  • Year: 2012
  • Pages: 108
  • Document Number: TR-1286-OSD

Citation

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Werber, Laura, Lindsay Daugherty, Edward G. Keating, and Matthew Hoover, An Assessment of the Civilian Acquisition Workforce Personnel Demonstration Project. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012. https://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR1286.html.
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The research described in this report was prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). The research was conducted within the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by OSD, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community.

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