Improving the Army Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution System (PPBES): The Planning Phase

This report documents work on the planning phase of the Army Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution System (PPBES). The Arroyo Center was asked by the Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations (DCSOPS) to assess the effectiveness of the reengineering of the Army planning and programming process in fiscal years 1995 and 1996. The Army had modified its planning and programming documents and asked the Arroyo Center to assess several of them to determine the extent to which the reengineering was successful and to suggest improvements. This report focuses on The Army Plan (TAP), the document that links planning to programming and provides the initial programming guidance to the Army Program Evaluation Groups. This report provides an assessment of TAP 2000-2015 and its Mission Areas (MAs) and recommends improvements for TAP 2002-2017. The authors identify several problems in TAP 00-15: mixing of operational and institutional functions, overlapping areas, overly broad and inappropriate MAs, unwieldy structure, and imprecise performance measures. With respect to TAP 02-17, the authors recommend that the Army reduce MAs to those that focus on operational missions and realign the MA hierarchy; start MA assessments before the publication of Army strategic planning guidance and the beginning of TAP work; and consider placing responsibility for the MAs and assessments (out not TAP) in a different section of DCSOPS to give it greater linkage to strategic planning.