The Fundamentals of Developing Operational Solutions for the Government

This book guides professionals on how to use operations research to solve problems and capture opportunities for government customers. The governments of modern democratic nations manage large complex societal operations to offer national defense, social services, infrastructure sustainment, law enforcement, monetary control, and other benefits for their citizens. The United States government alone spends over $1 trillion per year on these discretionary activities. Within all the spending, deliveries, and oversight, some operational needs require solutions to improve processes, architectures, technologies, and human factors. Without such effective and comprehensive solutions, the most eloquent proposal for government work could end in defeat and the most well-funded government programs could yield operational disruptions and performance failures. There are many books on how to write winning proposals to the government, but this book places winning in the context of deeply understanding government operations and innovatively solving government problems. There are also some books on convincing the government to adopt new transformational processes, but this book seeks to first try to fix current government processes before demanding risky transformation. Finally, there are massive tomes dedicated to the theories and mathematical models of operations research, but this book is devoted to making operations research simple enough for professionals to apply in the course of developing proposals and delivering products and services. Presenting the methods and techniques for quickly developing solutions is thus the central focus.