Rich Brady: Why it's time to reimagine the PPBE Process

Note: The article below is based on an interview conducted on the All Things Financial Management Podcast with guest Rich Brady, the CEO of ASMC. The podcast is a joint production between Guidehouse and The American Society of Military Comptrollers.

During the podcast, Mr. Brady discussed how recent events have accelerated the need to re-imagine the Planning, Programming, Budget and Execution process (PPBE).

As inflation has reached a 40-year high most DoD financial managers are faced with an unprecedented  operating environment which will impact all areas of defense. Economic stress negatively affects nearly every phase of PPBE, from programming and budgeting to execution. The result requires real trade-offs between near-term and long-term modernization efforts which necessitates a reimagining of the PPBE process as it has seen little change since the 1960s .

How can a reimagined PPBE process support an evolving, increasingly digital Department of Defense through the fifth industrial revolution? Mr. Brady has some suggestions and recommendations.

• Move Beyond Spreadsheets. According to Brady, “There's truly nothing more frustrating for a leader of any organization than to be handed a stack of spreadsheets.”
• Improve transparency. Gaining access to and integrating across systems – which is starting to happen – will improve data transparency. The result would be more confidence in the analysis and findings.
• Empower the FM community. There are numerous policy, process, system, and organizational challenges preventing defense financial managers from becoming the strategists and catalysts for their organizations.
• Offer enhanced decision support. Today, there are more capable tools which offer enhanced data analysis anddata visualizations to bring out and illuminate the data to create decision support information for our leaders.

Ultimately, better tools, increased transparency and an engaged and empowered workforce can provide leaders with better decision support in an age where agile, responsive budgeting is becoming increasingly important.

As Brady eloquently states, “We must operate in a risk informed or risk intelligent manner and not in a risk averse manner. We create more risk when we have an overly bureaucratic and fractured decision process that attempts to plan away all risk.”

A re-imagined PPBE process should not only focus on new technology. It must encompass a new mindset of empowered individuals who have the right information to operate with some uncertainty and risk to achieve desired outcomes. Process change will take time but changing the mindset may take longer.

Mr. Brady discusses a range of other topics throughout the podcast, which you can listen to in its entirety  here.