A sea story: Implementing the navy’s personnel assignment system

During its operational test and evaluation, despite top management support and significant technical achievements, a personnel assignment model implemented for the United States Navy to support assignment decisions experienced overwhelming resistance from the users, the 200 or so enlisted detailers, located at the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington, D.C. Our MS/OR research team had neglected to assess the negative impact of the personnel assignment model on an important detailing function: assignment negotiations or bargaining between the dealers and their customers, the service members. By involving the detailers in revising the model and making the failings of the old model the strengths of the new model, we turned certain failure into a successful program. By managing the behavioral aspects of the implementation with special emphasis on problem identification and requirements structuring, we overcame the difficulties of introducing change to a largely manual and highly decentralized decision process and we compare lessons learned with the experiences of other implementers.