How government oversight adds time to contractor engineering work

Samantha M. Brainard and Zoe Szajnfarber

Systems Engineering, 2019, vol. 22, issue 1, 54-65

Abstract: Oversight is necessary for evaluating the performance of contractors building complex systems for the U.S. government, but it can also result in additional program costs. In order to accurately measure the extent of these additional costs, stakeholders need to understand how oversight‐required activities add time to work. To that end, this paper presents the data from a qualitative research study to investigate how oversight adds time to contractor engineering work at a major U.S. aerospace company. We observed that oversight activities require many tasks to complete, which can add cascades of new activities that are performed in multiple iterations. Oversight activities cannot be accounted for in a binary way—oversight adds time to parts of all activities that the contractor performs. We describe the mechanisms through which oversight impacts work by extending the time spent on all activities. Understanding how added time occurs could help both contractors and government program managers determine ways to reduce unnecessary costs. Implications of these findings for systems engineers interested in conducting studies to measure the impact of oversight are discussed.

Date: 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1002/sys.21468

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:syseng:v:22:y:2019:i:1:p:54-65

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