Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Military Traffic Management Command's (MTMC) first interim progress report on the Department of Defense's demonstration program (MTMC pilot) to improve personal property shipments of the armed forces, focusing on MTMC's plan for evaluating the: (1) pilot results; and (2) proposed industry alternative called the Commercial-Like Activities for Superior Quality (CLASS) proposal.
GAO noted that: (1) the first interim progress report provides limited information on the status of the pilot program because it only recently began; (2) the report generally describes the methodology for evaluating the program based on 10 goals that were mutually agreed upon by industry and MTMC in 1996 and the definition and measurement of each goal; (3) overall, this approach appears to have merit, however, GAO noted some weaknesses in the methodology that could diminish the quality and credibility of MTMC's evaluation; (4) absent from the methodology is a delineation of roles and responsibilities of participating organizations and information on how the data will be collected, analyzed, and validated; (5) MTMC also does not specify what will constitute success for the pilot, particularly, how much weight each goal will have in determining overall success; (6) the interim progress report also does not provide any detail on how the CLASS proposal, that MTMC was directed by Congress to report on, will be evaluated; (7) such advance determinations would enhance the credibility of the results and avoid any perception of bias; and (8) in recent meetings, MTMC officials have indicated they are making changes to address these weaknesses.
