Software Aids Joint Operations Planning
Written by Tracy Sharpe
It’s not even perfected, yet people are begging for it.
Turbo Planner, a new software program developed by DISA’s Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD) team, is designed to significantly reduce administrative time in developing, reviewing and adjudicating adaptive plans for the Joint Operation Planning and Execution System (JOPES).
Turbo Planner is an enterprise Webservices- based tool that helps users collaboratively develop adaptive plans, orders and prerequisite documents.
“In any document production, people are challenged by format, by tracking changes from one version to another, and they are challenged by the staffing process—that of getting comments from people and adjudicating those comments,” said Tom Patterson, DISA’s Turbo Planner ACTD project manager. Patterson added that he has noticed planners are forced to spend too much time concerning themselves with format and not enough time composing the plan.
Turbo Planner allows the author to focus on content instead of format by providing a template and automatically assembling all the elements of a plan for printing.
“We provide a template, and with this template, we provide rigid flexibility,” said Patterson. The template is rigid because it follows and enforces the JOPES prescribed formats, but Turbo Planner is flexible because it allows additional paragraphs and sub-paragraphs to be added so long as they do not violate the JOPES prescribed format.
Turbo Planner currently provides three basic products—the Joint Operation Planning Process (JOPP), Adaptive Plans Levels 1 through 4, and all JOPES crisis orders. Joint operation plans frequently need a PowerPoint decision presentation. Turbo Planner allows the user to identify key points within the document. Then these key words, sentences or paragraphs are automatically formatted into a simple PowerPoint presentation.
REVIEW AND ADJUDICATION
Patterson is most impressed with the development of the review and adjudication features of Turbo Planner. A tremendous amount of time is spent on administrative tasks such as creating comments and updating changes to a plan, he noted.
Currently, when a reviewer wants to recommend a change within a plan, he or she has to find and record the page number, paragraph number and line number, then enter the comment using “line in/line out” notation. Then the reviewer must specify whether it is a “specific” or “general” comment. Finally, the comment must be tagged as an “administrative,” “substantive,” “major” or “critical” change.
With Turbo Planner, the reviewer simply highlights the sentence needing comment, clicks on the “review” icon, and a window pops up. The window shows the sentence’s page, paragraph and line number. The reviewer simply chooses “specific” or “general” for the category, then chooses the severity of the notation such as “administrative,” “substantive,” “major” or “critical.” Finally, the reviewer types in the change or comment.
Patterson cited an incident that illustrates the present administrative burden of adjudication. It took one person an estimated 1,000 hours to incorporate changes from 4,500 comments on a 144-page Joint Staff Chairman’s instruction. “If you applied the Turbo Planner concept to other documents generated by the Pentagon, you can save years of effort that can be used to do other high-priority tasks,” said Patterson.
Turbo Planner is ready for planners to use now, but new features are already being developed for a more advanced version. Patterson and his team are improving the adjudication process by devising a way to show the changes in context, noting whether it is a comment mentioned by other reviewers (thus reducing redundant corrections), and allowing the adjudicator to accept changes.
These features of Turbo Planner would not be possible without the Microsoft Office 2003 implementation of XML (Extensible Markup Language) tagging in Word documents. XML tagging allows information, such as the words that fill in the blanks in Turbo Planner templates, to be used in many different applications instead of one. Therefore, information in Turbo Planner can be automatically converted to a Power- Point presentation or inserted into a report for comments.
Patterson said that when he introduces this tool to planners, they cry out, “I’ll take it now!” or, “I want to use this with other documents, too!”
“We’re looking at how to make Turbo Planner functionality available for a wider audience,” said Patterson. He and his team are already considering the implications of applying the Turbo Planner functions to other processes.
“If we had templates for DISA instructions, we’d achieve significant savings for those documents,” he said. Patterson is eager to share the pilot suite with planners via SIPRNet. To schedule a presentation about the benefits of Turbo Planner or to have a pilot suite of software and security information, contact Patterson (
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) at (703) 882-1577. ♦
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Tracy Sharpe is with DISA Corporate Communications.
