Ben Point

The Anthropology of Software

February 15, 2007

Lessons from the Army Budget Office

I worked for a contractor in the Pentagon Army Budget Office in and around 1995. Few of my projects have been as successful as this one, and it was also unique for me because I spent a lot of time working directly with the customers, learning their way of doing business, i.e. collecting requirements.

The ABO has an annual schedule that revolves around U.S. budget cycles, and they have both civilian and military personel working together on budget coordination. As I recall there was a staff of about 5 and then about 15 analysts would be there at headquarters during crunch time, and many more people were involved. The coordination in the ABO involved gathering and working with lots of forms filled out by people at the field offices as well as the decisions made in budget meetings.

During certain times of the year it became pretty hectic as they put together the issues and decisions that were the basis for the large budget books that would end up being combined with other branches of the Department of Defense and ultimately with all the programs under the U.S. government.

The software we built to help coordinate this was primarily in Microsoft Word using the language WordBasic.

Word was in many ways an excellent solution because it allowed precise simulation of the age-old forms the Army has been using for decades, and through Word's template feature it could be distributed merely by sending the document via e-mail, since all of the machines already had Word installed. The WordBasic software was able to help calculate and check values in tables, enforce naming conventions, and also run reports and combine and merge documents.

They saw a great improvement over programs they'd seen elsewhere or in the past. Typical solutions had to be installed and expected you to enter information through dialogs that did not closely resemble the standard forms. And the other alternative to dialog-based applications, forms packages, did not have the kinds of page breaking and dynamic row breaking and table column headings that Word had. Some other budget forms were done in Excel though Excel neither supported text entry well nor closely resembled the original forms.

But the Word-based solution was not all perfect. There were limitations with respect to controlling and guiding the input. While it was great to allow users to use their familiar Word processor to change font, bullet and bold text and so forth, there was no user friendly way to limit or standardize this usage. It was also very slow and clunky. Reports involving hundreds of pages would take hours.

And we had quite a scramble when the first Word virus burst onto the scene in the summer of 1995, remember that?

Some people felt that our solution should have done more in terms of the work flow. But I felt that at that stage on a tight IT budget, trying to institute conventional work flow software would have added a rigidity to the system that would have stood in their way. Users e-mailed documents to each other and even sent them on diskette, so that in those cases they were ultimately responsible for ensuring the right versions were submitted. The team also used frequent e-mail notices as well as a bulletin board on the wall to help coordinate activities.

The document-based system was ideal for flexibility. Shared folders on the LAN were used by WordBasic to submit documents where WordBasic tracking reports were run on the administrator's machine to summarize status, and merge pieces of documents. The simple architecture meant that workarounds and ad hoc adjustments were intuitive to the team because they understood the folder organization of documents and could access them with Windows Explorer.

By utilizing Word for Windows, e-mail, and familiar ways of using computers, training was minimized and they were able to concentrate more on the actual work than wrestling with the software. The staff really appreciated the fact that although the system did not automate everything it rarely stood in their way, and this was the key to success in that ad hoc environment.

Post a comment