Innovation: It's not always obvious

by Airman 1st Class Erin R. Babis
48th Fighter Wing Public Affairs

12/12/2014 - ROYAL AIR FORCE LAKENHEATH, England  -- The obvious solution isn't always the right solution.         

"In the military, we all operate in a similar manner: we see a problem, and we typically try to address it right then and there," explained Capt. Zach Martin, co-facilitator for a recent Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century event. "Sometimes we get lucky, and it works, but most of the time we don't."

Subject matter experts from the scheduling office of each fighter squadron and the 48th Munitions Squadron came together to find a solution to reduce the amount of unscheduled work that has been causing instability and undue stress for the Airmen of the 48th MUNS.

Martin explained that, on day one of the AFSO21 event, members of the group were already trying to offer solutions to a problem that hadn't yet been identified.

"Our job as facilitators was to rope them back in and say, 'Hey, the first part of AFSO21 is to understand the current process how it exists right now,'" Martin said. "'We will get to solutions later.' The reason why that's important is, all the solutions people were saying, when I compared them with our final task list, none of them were on there."

The AFSO21 method lays out a process from beginning to end as it currently exists. Then, a team identifies the redundancies and shortcomings of the process that can be refined or innovated.

Master Sgt. Forrest McCracken, director of AFSO21 for the 48th Fighter Wing, explained that the role of facilitators is, "making sure everyone considers all the aspects, not only in their process, but the effects of their changes that they'd make as well. It's very important that you don't make a quick decision on a change before considering the outcome and the knock-on effects of that change within your unit and within other units."

"I'm asking you to really take a good look at this process," briefed Col. Scottie Zamzow, 48th Operations Group commander, before the team began the event. "Let's see what we can do to make it as efficient as possible and ultimately it's going to help the MUNS team. They don't have the manpower to do all the scheduled work plus 27 percent unscheduled work."

The group discovered that flying schedule deviations created unscheduled work orders, which accounted for 27 percent of all MUNS work orders.The flying schedule process was not created with munitions scheduling timelines in mind.

The team's goal was to reduce the unscheduled workload from 27 to nine percent.

"We used to have 600,000 people in our Air Force and now we have 317,000 people in our Air Force," Zamzow said. "So, a process that used to be pretty smart back when we had twice the amount of people that we have now, maybe is not the most efficient and effective. We are looking for efficiency, but not at the expense of effectiveness. If I can get the same effectiveness and, instead of 27 percent additional work, we are only doing nine percent additional work, that's money. Stability is the key."

"There were some big light bulbs that came on, on both sides, in terms of how each side operates," Martin said. "All the OPS guys in the room, I think they were humbled by the fact that things we took for granted and changed were causing dozens and dozens of Airmen to work significantly longer days and essentially wasting their time."

Both facilitators, Martin and Tech. Sgt. Jason Harlan, explained that a large part of figuring out a solution was having all the different squadrons educate each other on how they operate and what their different requirements are.

"We came to realize that the problem was far more complex than we originally thought," Harlan said. "With complexity comes problems, so we identified more shortcomings in the process and came up with an ideal state."

The team created a new scheduling process that includes 48th MUNS and a new operating instruction will be written on the process of creating a flight schedule. New measures are being taken to ensure that, if a change has to be made, the people making those changes are held accountable for them.

Martin explained, when we immediately address a problem without the process of identifying the root cause we're just putting a Band-Aid on it.

"The AFSO21 process was systematic," Martin said. "It took three full days, but the task list we created here addresses the root cause, not what was on the surface."

"The goal was to get that 27 percent down to nine percent no later than February 2015," said Capt. Brutus White, team lead for the AFSO21 event. "I'm confident that what we have created has the ability to achieve that goal if not exceed it."