A metric evaluation approach for the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act

Abstract

The Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA) was enacted in 1990 to improve the quality and professionalism of the Department of Defense acquisition workforce. To assess the effectiveness of DAWIA, actual outcomes of the law must be compared to its original objectives. A particular difficulty in evaluating public policies is that they usually cannot be measured in terms of output, such as dollars, hours, or physical units. The primary objective of this study was to find and introduce a performance measurement approach suitable for identifying effective metrics. A second objective was to establish a link between metrics and outcomes. Using the performance measurement approach as a tool, an analysis attempted to link acquisition workforce metrics with specific outcomes. To explore this issue, a literature review of relevant organizational and management texts on public policy analysis, performance measurement and program evaluation was conducted. Four suitable frameworks for performance measurement were found and evaluated. The preferred approach for evaluating DAWIA was determined to be a combination of two performance measurement approaches. The new approach is called Metric Assessment and Measurement Approach. It includes valuable features of the two approaches, and a newly developed metric template for evaluating metrics