The battle for better comms

The Land Environment Tactical Communications and Information Systems (LE TacCIS) programme is one of the highest priority programmes in the British Army and is aiming to transform how tactical communications are delivered on the battlefield.

Part of the remit of LE TacCIS is to upgrade and replace obsolete equipment and enable the armed forces to react to developments in new technology. This has involved a recent upgrade of the Bowman tactical communication system – a complete overhaul of the core system used by not only the British Army, but also the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.

The upgraded Bowman system – which is less complex and addresses key obsolescence issues – was fielded by the army for the first time in late 2018. The project team at the Ministry of Defence (MOD) can now reflect as the programme endpoint – the new Bowman system is expected to be fully implemented by June 2020 – looms into view.

“The way we have worked on the project has been completely collaborative. This has been an incredibly complex, multifaceted programme with both software and hardware themes,” says Dave Roberts, Bowman 5.6 project manager at Information, Systems and Services within Joint Forces Command at the MOD’s Abbey Wood site in Bristol. Roberts has worked closely with programme manager Donna Andrews and her project team at hardware and software supplier General Dynamics UK, as well as his customer, Colonel Liz Dallyn from Army HQ.

Roberts and Dallyn joined the Bowman 5.6 project during a period of transition from a traditional waterfall model to a ‘pseudo-agile’ approach to delivering military tactical communications, which has proved successful under their direction. They’ve worked together and collaboratively with General Dynamics UK in order to reassess timescales – the programme is now on course to meet the demands of its external schedule from the MOD – and make sure the army ends up with a solution fitting its requirements.

Roberts instigated monthly project reviews with Army HQ to make sure the upgrade to Bowman was moving forward and that everyone knew what was going on.

“It was important that Colonel Dallyn and her team heard exactly what was taking place,” Roberts explains, adding that the alternative would have been to write a report to be “staffed through” the army reporting chain to Dallyn. Rather, he explains, “we wanted her there listening to the key messages and knowing what the issues and risks were”. Roberts also introduced a weekly governance call with his own team, General Dynamics UK and Colonel Dallyn’s team. “That empowered us to make the decisions we needed to make, rather than waiting for the review each month,” Roberts explains.

Breaking boundaries

Dallyn notes that, as the project team negotiated this challenging period, it was important to break down organisational boundaries. “There were clearly some challenges in meeting the timelines and outputs for Bowman,” she says. “The danger is that, when you experience challenges, everyone dives into their foxhole and puts up boundaries. The alternative is that everyone comes together to solve those problems.

“In the case of this project, it has been helped by the personalities involved. The key is that we have an open and transparent conversation. Occasionally you have to make compromises, and you make them in order to keep the project moving forward.”

Andrews explains that emotional intelligence and a collaborative attitude played an important part in delivering Bowman. “The softer side of project management was very much in evidence,” she says. “Emotional intelligence is important in terms of being able to understand the pressure each individual is under. We needed to give early indications of factors that were going to derail things – so that I had the support I needed in order to get the engineering team to be able to deliver on a certain problem.”

The main systems integration team at General Dynamics UK, based in South Wales, had 100 people working on Bowman, in addition to other key suppliers globally, including BAE Systems, hardware manufacturer Leonardo DRS, and General Dynamics Mission Systems in Calgary, Canada, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, US. Andrews had five project managers in the UK reporting directly to her, as well as a programme manager at each supplier site. The collaborative aspect was illustrated by the fact that General Dynamics UK allowed testers from the British Army into its laboratories.

Roberts explains: “Although this wasn’t an agile approach to project management, General Dynamics UK allowed my team and users of Bowman to go into the labs, which helped the engineers and software developers there understand how this system was going to be used and employed in the field.”

Roberts says that, although the approach “wasn’t strictly agile, we built relationships where we had the capability to influence development and the way in which this system was going to be used in the future”.

At all times, the needs of troops on the ground were at the forefront of the minds of all project leaders and project staff. Dallyn says: “There were trade-offs that had to be made in the cost, time and performance triangle. People made those trade-offs collaboratively. We weren’t restricted by the contract. Did we need to trade performance to save time? Actually, no.”

Because Bowman is such an important communications system – it is not only carried by troops, but also sits on all platforms, such as ships, aircraft and land vehicles – maintaining business-as-usual operations while introducing the upgraded system was critical. Since being introduced in 2002, Bowman has seen extensive service in Iraq and Afghanistan and has been subject to a number of upgrades during that period – although nothing as big as Bowman 5.6. The programme is seeing new hardware and software introduced concurrently, including: the replacement of most military off-the-shelf user data terminals; the introduction of commercial off-the-shelf data terminals; an extensive upgrade to a more modern Windows operating system; and an upgrade to the army’s ComBAT battle management system. A number of technical obsolescence issues have been dealt with as a result, says the project team.

Streamlined

The scale of the project is immense. Roberts explains that the project team has the challenge of integrating the hardware and software for 13,000 land platforms, 50,000 radios and circa 13,500 data terminals. Benefits realisation has meant that the “older, clunkier” ComBAT has been superseded by a streamlined version that’s more intuitive. The new Windows operating system is designed to give the ComBAT application a familiar look and feel for troops. The user interface has been simplified and there is a new geographic information system, and open application programming interfaces. ComBAT should also enable improved planning and regrouping of units on the battlefield.

“In the past, that has been time-consuming and quite difficult to manage. This will make it easier to plan and manage who is on what part of the network,” Dallyn explains.

Technology is changing, and the army has to evolve with it, says Roberts. “Many of the troops now are of the smartphone generation. We want to make technology as intuitive as possible so that it is as familiar as Google Earth or the Microsoft packages people have grown up with. If you do that, it reduces the training burden. People can get up to speed with a new system a lot quicker.”

The next major LE TacCIS project, MORPHEUS, will take the evolution of technology for the armed forces a stage further thanks to the development of new, open architecture for hardware and software. This will assist the army in the adoption of technology-agnostic hardware, potentially cutting procurement costs and opening up a wider choice of suppliers. New applications might be introduced to hardware as they are developed, rather than relying on long-term, proprietary software systems.

“Technology change could be as simple as downloading an app to your iPhone – although we obviously need to take into account all the security and ruggedisation implications,” Dallyn says.

She concludes: “At the moment, the way we buy our hardware and software is tightly integrated. But I don’t know what software I will want in 10 years’ time. We want a core product we can develop as the demands of the armed forces change.”

 

Ben Hargreaves is editor of Project