R2-D2 TO P2: COL. THOMPSON’S GRAD SCHOOL PROJECT FOR LEGENDARY FILMMAKER FORESHADOWED CORPS’ TECHNOLOGY TOOL

What do George Lucas’s fabled Skywalker Ranch and P2 have in common?

COL Richard Thompson.

In 1986 he was performing six hours of independent study for his master’s degree at the University of California/Berkeley. Across the Golden Gate Bridge, Lucas, the legendary director of the Star Wars sagas and other blockbusters, was building his own anti-Hollywood enclave north of San Francisco.

One of the project’s subcontractors asked the military grad student to help improve delivery time and production efficiency at the ranch. The project manager, recalls COL Thompson, now the Los Angeles District Chief Engineer, was using a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet to calculate inventories and other processes. “The spreadsheet became so huge it would cover a whole wall,” COL Thompson says. “I realized what they were doing there would be better served in a database environment than in Lotus. So I created the same effect as their spreadsheet.”

Entering such items as workers’ productivity rates, quantity of materials and number of work hours into a program, he was able to simplify and speed up projections for building the filmmaker’s creative hideaway.

At his next duty assignment, in Chicago, the young Army officer remembered that template. The Chicago district was still using stand-alone personal computers that required dialing into a modem, then carrying a floppy disk from PC to PC. “We started planning together a project management system integrated with a database,” he says.

And that, in a compact disk, is P2.

Oh, it would take another 16 years or so, and the efforts of hundreds within the Corps and many outside it. But the conceptual groundwork for what is touted to become the Corps’ most important technological tool was at least partly laid among the redwoods and the undulating brown hills of Skywalker Ranch.

Did the young captain ever meet George Lucas himself? “He was passing through the facility once,” he remembers, “with Linda Ronstadt.”

Stripped of jargon, P2 gets everybody involved in the project management system. “There will be a much greater sense that all the projects we do are team efforts,” COL Thompson says. “We now have opportunities to do more things and do things differently because in the past we were constrained by our tools. The new system gives us much better flexibility.”

It consists of several commercial off-the-shelf software packages that complement existing Corps software systems. One big advantage is that P2 brings those systems together in one location so that information need be entered only once. That’s crucial, because in fiscal 05, all Corps business processes will be used to input all labor, travel and projects into P2. Projects not inputted in P2 won’t be funded.

It’s clear that a single database for all information on a project will save time and money for the Corps, its customers and stakeholders. Some of its advantages:

--Identifies the right people for a job;

--Shares data across districts and regions;

--Increases real-time information;

--Tracks a project’s budget, resources and schedule.

Soon-to-be-retired Chief Engineer LTG Bob Flowers has been a strong P2 backer. “P2 is not just a business process system, although that’s its primary function, and it will do that extremely well,” he told a Town Hall meeting last year. “P2 is also a knowledge management system. Its reporting functions will allow us to capture the lessons we learn and preserve them.”

Given COL Thompson’s early involvement with P2’s incubation, it’s no surprise he’s also on the bandwagon: “We need to test the limits…to make it even better for the project, for the customer and for ourselves, to allow us to be more efficient and effective.”

Or, as Yoda said in Star Wars: “Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.”