 We are so excited to have you here for our next presentation, the By Better Revolution Information Update. Giving the update is Mr. Edward J. Gibbons, the Director of the Contracting and Procurement Modernization Tax Force. He is leading an integrated team of contracting professionals, program managers, and operational customers focused on executing the Coast Guard's By Better Revolution. The By Better Revolution will modernize how the contracting and procurement enterprise does business, making support systems easier for customers, making the Coast Guard an employer of choice for contracting and procurement professionals, and providing the tools and programs needed to continually improve the life cycle of contracting and procurement activities. Following the brief, Mr. Gibbons will be taking questions from the audience, so please stick around. Mr. Gibbons. Thank you. So thanks for showing up and I'm told to hold the mic close so everyone can hear me. I know I've attended a few of these and it gets pretty loud just right around the mid-spot of the blue carpet right there. So again, I'm Ed Gibbons. I am leading a task force. Our task force is made up of right now over 300 people that participated in our By Better Revolution and we are looking at all the Coast Guard contracting and procurement activities and the enterprise to improve our capabilities. So what are we, right? So we are really a modernization initiative in the tradition of Coast Guard modernization started back under Admiral Allen 15 years ago. We are implementing the Coast Guard business model and we're trying to really focus on contracting and procurement capabilities because frankly the environment that we're operating in, the systems we're supporting are more complicated, there are more demanding demands on the Coast Guard, you heard it come out today, the missions and the relevance of the Coast Guard has never been greater. So we have to keep pace with that in delivering support to our systems. And you can see we're trying to do this at the same time as we're trying to let our operators operate and provide them the support they need. You can see we have four characteristics of trying to achieve as well, have a customer-centric approach, implement next generation technology and clear accountability and authority and create workplace choice for our workforce. So again we're aligned with the Coast Guard strategy, we're aligned as well with the DCMS Mission Support Action Plan. So we're trying to, as we implement these initiatives, we're also trying to ensure that we're responsive and innovative and integrated as we do this. So one of the things of note here with our contracted procurement workforce is that it's a highly specialized, particularly on the civilian side, the 1102 series is very specialized, very highly mobile. So particularly in the DC area that the folks are able to, there's a lot of job opportunities. So we have a lot of, workforce is very mobile and they come to the Coast Guard and leave the Coast Guard, unlike other particular series in the civilian workforce. So in a way you can actually look at a civilian workforce, you can manage it almost like it's a military workforce. It's very specialized, you can move them around and in some places we have folks who are here for the career, but then other folks are kind of coming and going. So when we talk about the talent management task force that's out there as well, this particular workforce is a really good fit for all the initiatives we're talking about. So our case for change, we have two primary movers here. One is that we need to deliver the mission with our contracting. Every time we need to obtain goods and services that we're not doing organically, we need to do that better. We need to be more integrated with the mission. We've heard that loudly and clearly from our operational commanders and also the workforce. Our workforce is under a lot of stress. We do more work than our contracting actions per person is at least twice that of any other agency in DHS. So we're working harder, not smarter, and the impact of that on our workforce is tremendous. We also have a lot of different demands on them. We've implemented, we have a lot of different IT systems. This is a challenge for our folks in many different ways. So we have to address that to make this a workplace of choice. So again, this is what we're trying to achieve, the customer centered approach. Try to get our data analytics going and deliver the tools we need. Really take a look at our governance, our organizational design, and also create that workplace of choice. So how are we doing this? So we basically have, so the mission, D.C.M. Deputy Commander for Mission Support before Admiral Thomas commissioned a study. They came back with 14, an acquisition study came back with 14 recommendations. The consultant group did that. And our task force is trying to implement that. And what we've done is we bucketed those 14 recommendations and added to them, but they've fallen in these general areas. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to implement these changes and analyze and conduct an analysis of all these recommendations through an agile project management approach. So we have four lines of effort, workforce policy and process governance and data analytics. And each of these are led by what we call a leadership team. There's four teams, so we call them the quad teams. There's 15 stakeholders, senior stakeholders in the organization on each team and they are overseeing a series of agile teams which are chunking out different subject matters and deriving different courses of action that we can do to address them each day. So as a result we have those 15 folks in each team and they are with the project for the whole year and they own the strategy for each of these lines of effort for the workforce and whatnot. So that's, you can see it's a pretty broad effort. We have a lot of great contributors to it. So this is an eye chart and I'm sorry, but just to show what we are, how complex and broad this is, we have, these are all the different sprints. So we're using scrum from agile project management as our sort of basis. And these are all the different sprints we're undertaking in each swim lane line of effort. And you can see how I guess interdependent it is. You can see a lot of crossover. We tried to highlight that with the color coding, but we learned quickly that a policy change drives a workforce change and vice versa and governance change. Who's doing the work? How we're doing the work? Where are the decision rights? All of those things. Everything to the right. So we're on number six now. But everything to the right. We have changed because agile project management, what are the characteristics of agile project management? And one of those is you accept the fact you don't know your requirements. You learn as you go. So all the topics to the right, they still change. We're changing the names every day and we're refocusing to try and get the work done. But we're at the end of May, we're pencils down and we're going to start writing our recommendations for our blueprint. We're going to deliver a blueprint for change, which is the common Coast Guard change management document. And we're going to deliver that here in the fourth quarter. And then, but we're trying to take action early and we have pushed off a lot of the different policy owners have made changes based on our work with our task force already. And then we are going to have an implementation office take over this summer. And we're trying to create that right now as well to implement the task force. So one of the reasons we wanted to talk here is because one of the things we're doing right now, and I didn't point it out, I should have, but one spring that's coming up is our supplier management spring. And coming to an industry show like this and talking to folks, what we're trying to do is understand what it's like to do business with a Coast Guard. So these are some points we have, some questions we have, or an understanding of where we are. The role of our relationships with industry is really critical in doing market research, understanding what's out there. And we hear a lot of criticism from industry. We really don't know what we're asking for a lot of times. So we spend a lot of time understanding that we really don't do our requirements packages all that well. And a lot of that comes down to the fact that all of our SMEs are SMEs on what we have, not on what we need to have. And they're the folks who are writing the technical requirements to lead it. So what's the organization that can create that change when we ask for new capabilities? So a lot of that's just relationship and a lot of that's just comfort level with talking to industry. And we've had a lot of, I think, barriers to that that were self-imposed. But we're trying to change that, trying to understand that it's okay. We need to provide access. We need to invest in that access and that communications with industry early rather than later. And we understand, I've been told that people are choosing not to compete with the Coast Guard just due to the process of trying to engage with the Coast Guard. So we're trying to understand all of that. And then also as we manage suppliers with a contract that's been awarded, that's another area that we need to improve on. And we have a lot of, I think, best practices we're finding that we're going to implement as well in that regard. So again, this is what we're trying to achieve. We're really trying to really establish ongoing communications and ongoing understanding and build an organization that's able to do this where we understand what's going on in the workforce. We've done this at times where we've initiated, we've started these kind of, it's not just an industry day every now and again. You really got to, the organization's got to be integrated and all in on understanding what's out there and what are we trying to achieve. If we're ever going to turn around our capabilities of, well, our spend per K.O., for example, if we're ever going to flip that around, we need to have a different way of doing business and we need to find, we need to help to do it. What's the right vehicle or what's the right way to get after this particular issue? Those are all part of what we're trying to achieve. And again, this is all really about relationships and supplier management and engagement and so we're really interested in your thoughts. If you're, we have posters and we have a bar code, there's a survey there and we're really interested in folks to come and fill it out and tell us what it's like to do business with a Coast Guard. Tell us what it should be like and any ideas that you have so we're going to have a focus group, an online focus group. It might be the first, but it'll certainly, it might be the first of one in my team who might have more, but that's coming up and I think it's April 13th, the date's not there, but if you scan, you can sign up for that and participate as a virtual session and a discussion of all those topics and what it's like to be a supplier for the Coast Guard. So that's my presentation and we have time for questions. We have plenty of time for questions. Thank you, Mr. Gibbons. Questions from the audience? Any questions for Mr. Gibbons? All right. Well, thank you very much, sir. We greatly appreciate it. Excellent presentation. And thank you to everyone who has come out to the Coast Guard booth these past three days and watched our presentations and engaged. We've really enjoyed having you here. Please keep an eye on our schedule for next year of speakers. We'll be putting that on the website in the springtime, so we hope you come back again and continue to engage with us. Thank you.