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How Frustrations About Oversight Can Lead to Inefficiencies in Contractor Work

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Systems Engineering in Context

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Abstract

Government oversight is an important part of any complex system acquisitions because it enables the government evaluate its stakeholders’ performance. Oversight, however, can add additional costs to a program. In order to determine the extent of the burden of these activities, scholars need to understand how oversight impacts the work that contractor engineers perform. Oversight can have both objective, measurable impacts, and it can have subjective impacts on the contractor’s feelings about what they have to do. While studies have been conducted to objectively study oversight’s burden, there has not been work to investigate how frustrations about oversight impact how contractors do their work. To that end, we conducted an in-depth, qualitative study of a major US aerospace contractor to understand how frustrations about oversight can lead to contractors spending additional time on their work. We identify the mechanisms through which this added time can occur and discuss implications for these findings. Since inducing frustration on the workforce can lead to objective inefficiencies in work processes, it is important for systems engineering researches to consider these issues when making process improvements.

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Acknowledgment

This work was funded by the NASA Systems Engineering Consortium.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    Samantha Brainard & Zoe Szajnfarber

Authors
  1. Samantha Brainard
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  2. Zoe Szajnfarber
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Samantha Brainard .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Stephen Adams

  2. Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Peter A. Beling

  3. Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    James H. Lambert

  4. Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    William T. Scherer

  5. Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Cody H. Fleming

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Brainard, S., Szajnfarber, Z. (2019). How Frustrations About Oversight Can Lead to Inefficiencies in Contractor Work. In: Adams, S., Beling, P., Lambert, J., Scherer, W., Fleming, C. (eds) Systems Engineering in Context. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00114-8_18

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