Program Executive Officer (PEO) Concept Is it Functioning as Intended?

In 1987 the Army implemented the Program Executive Officer Management concept. This new system was forced upon the Army and its sister services by the White House and Congress. It was their response to the American people's perception that acquisition in the services was too costly and not sufficiently managed to provide quality products for the troops. This PEO concept, now four years old, has totally changed the way the services oversee their acquisition programs. The implementation and subsequent transition to the PEO concept was not easy, as I will show by way of interviews with key acquisition personnel and historical information. Traditionally powerful people and organizations realized they were no longer going to control the acquisition process. Some affected players fought its implementation openly and others tacitly. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the Army's implementation of the PEO concept and to explain why and where it has not performed as intended so we can learn from this experience.