The U.S. Air Force's Air Combat Command, the service's largest major command with more than $1.2 billion in construction and waste cleanup work it performs or manages, used to see 90% of its projects come in late. Now, using a motivational approach familiar to football fans, the command has turned its performance record around. Now 75% of ACC's projects over the last three years have come in ahead of schedule and 90% of ACC's current projects are ahead of an aggressively accelerated schedule. At the same time, project costs have dropped from 3.8% over budget four years ago to 0.3% over budget in the fiscal year that ended last September.
Air Force officials were less than thrilled with the performance of the eight major commands in general, chastising them for failing to keep their own construction forces and the other military services that build for them in step with private sector peers. Hotel-sized military base dormitories, for example, were taking 22 to 28 months to build. That was not acceptable. "If it takes a year [plus] to build a Holiday Inn Express, then I want similar timelines and speed," says Maj. Gen. Dean Fox, the Air Force Civil Engineer, Washington, D.C.