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This study aims to compare linear programming and stable marriage approaches to the personnel assignment problem under conditions of uncertainty. Robust solutions should exhibit reduced variability of solutions in the presence of one or more additional constraints or problem perturbations added to some baseline problems.

Several variations of each approach are compared with respect to solution speed, solution quality as measured by officer-to-assignment preferences and solution robustness as measured by the number of assignment changes required after inducing a set of representative perturbations or constraints to an assignment instance. These side constraints represent the realistic assignment categorical priorities and limitations encountered by army assignment managers who solve this problem semiannually, and thus the synthetic instances considered herein emulate typical problem instances.

The results provide insight regarding the trade-offs between traditional optimization and heuristic-based solution approaches.

The results indicate the viability of using the stable marriage algorithm for talent management via the talent marketplace currently used by both the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force for personnel assignments.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on the author’s background testing resilience in “no fail” organisations at the heart of UK government. The paper outlines a lean approach to high-impact training for strategic leaders, achieved in the form of low-cost exercises and harnessed to build resilience by surfacing risks, engaging with options and modelling decision outcomes. Repeated rehearsal of crisis and risk management responses grows organisational resilience and human capacity and reduces reputational, legal, operational and other costs.

The methodology employed scenario-driven exercises (SDEs) is described for the first time in the open literature.

Approaches such as SDEs build strategic resilience through effective training and learning, focusing on the fundamental priorities of strategic delivery, reputation and crisis management through avoiding and reacting to challenging circumstances.

By being targeted at probing and gaming participants’ taking of decisions and logic of analysing available information, the use of frugal SDEs can provide substantial value in organisations where robust testing is welcomed and its findings implemented.

SDEs are described for the first time in the open literature.

United States Air Force (USAF) acquisition programs have historically suffered from extended acquisition cycle times and cost and schedule overruns. Department of Defense senior leadership has called for "transformation" of the acquisition process. In this article, we investigate an Evolutionary Acquisition (EA) strategy and the spiral development process. This article presents the case study analysis of three USAF acquisition programs: Global Hawk, B-2 Bomber, and Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV). Data were collected through extensive literature review, interviews with acquisition experts from the three program offices, and completed questionnaires from members of Air Force Materiel Command’s (AFMC) Acquisition Center of Excellence (ACE), Aeronautical Systems Center’s (ASC) Transformation Team, and ASC’s ACE.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.

This paper evaluates an Air Force performance-based service contract against the contracts that were prescriptive in the past. Department of Defense mandated that all service contracts be performance-based by 2005. The goal of the paper is to determine whether this contract, after becoming performance-based, is achieving greater cost savings and better outcomes for government, contractor, and taxpayers. The paper assesses the contract performance standards and how they are measured. The authors analyze the language of the Statement of Work (SOW) before and after it became performance-based. The contractor’s performance is evaluated. Positive incentives are identified and described. Finally, the paper addresses risk assessment issues.

In this paper, kinematic synthesis of a planar flight control system mechanism has been conducted for a light aircraft designed and built by TAI. To achieve a simple construction, the four‐bar linkages are used in the synthesis. Freudenstein's Method and Bloch's Method are utilized for analytical three and four bar position syntheses respectively. A case study of an elevator flight control system is presented.

We contend that software developers have an ethical responsibility to strive for reliable software. We base that obligation on long standing engineering traditions that place the public good as a central tenant and on the professional relationship between a software developer and the users of the software developed.

Provides a number of basic indicators in support of the assertion that, while the general‐management literature on post‐command developments in central and eastern Europe is well established, the corresponding literature in HRM/HRD is probably less well advanced. Highlights the issues identified by each of the contributors, two organising themes being involved. The first asserts the value of mutual knowledge transfer, through which the western academic and practitioner might benefit as much as his/her central European counterpart; the second considers the extent to which personnel managers can make a strategic, as distinct from administrative‐operational, contribution to the organisation in the post‐command economy.

Agile software development (ASD) is currently an emerging approach in software engineering for improving quality, initially advocated by a group of 17 software professionals who practice a set of “lightweight” methods, and share a common set of values of software development. Owing to the attractive claims of successes of the ASD approach, many traditional projects, which used to practice plan‐driven software development, are gradually transitioning into ASD‐based development. This paper seeks to report the results from a survey‐based ex‐post‐facto study aimed at determining the relative importance, if any, of the changes traditional plan‐driven software development projects have to undergo to adopt ASD practices.

The study was conducted using a web‐based survey with ASD practitioners who had experience of practicing plan‐driven software development in the past. ASD practitioners from a wide range of industrial sectors participated in the study. Similarly, the study is not restricted to any specific organisation/project size, culture, or nationality – the respondents were widely geographically distributed across continents.

The study received 241 responses, of which 165 were usable. The study did not reveal any substantial difference in importance of the four classes of changes hypothesised – changes in culture, changes in management style, changes in knowledge management strategy and changes in development processes. The authors believe that this is an important finding because it is indicative of not isolating one class of changes from another in practical transition exercises. However, another noteworthy observation was that transitioning from heavily process‐centric to short, iterative, test‐driven, and people‐centric development was considered by the largest percentage (roughly 77 per cent) of respondents to be very important. The open‐ended questions in the study also revealed three additional classes of changes: changes in personal characteristics, changes in customer attitude, and changes in knowledge and education of stakeholders.

In this work an attempt was made to gain an understanding of the relative importance of the different critical changes that would be helpful to a project manager who is involved in the transition from traditional plan‐driven software development practices to agile software development practices.