In the early 1990's Defense Systems Management College in Fort Belvoir, Virginia (DSMC), offered a series of Interactive Management (IM) Workshops for Defense Acquisition Project Managers. The Workshops were organized by Henry Alberts a professor at DSMC, and were based on Alberts’ 5 years experience with Warfield’s program at George Mason University. It was Henry who coined the name TMAW for the Workshops (Technical Managers Advanced Workshops). I don't know how many such workshops Henry ran all dealing with acquisition processes at Department of Defense.
Because his Defense Systems workshops were so politically sensitive, Henry did not wish to be on record as author or producer of the workshop reports, or the videotapes. None of the printed TMAW IM reports list him as author, but Henry was the author of all of them. The Interactive Management workshops resulted in major reforms to Defense acquisition processes, in an act of Congress in 1994 https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/senate-bill/1587
Later, Henry considered writing up the IM Workshops as part of a doctoral thesis. Henry had worked and studied informally with Warfield, and used Warfield's methodology in the workshops, but since George Mason University had no Systems Science program Warfield could not be a doctoral advisor for Henry's work. John steered Henry to a university which did offer the Systems doctorate - City University, in London, where Henry obtained his PH.D. in 1996, under John's friend and colleague, R. Ross Janes.
GMU Libraries has videos of a TMAW workshop held June 17-21, 1991. This is the only TMAW workshop for which we have video tapes. Cassettes numbered 1 through 9 contain films of the workshop sessions. Henry Alberts was the facilitator. Helping him in the workshop were Carlos Villanueva from ITESM (Tec de Monterrey, Mexico), Ken Crowe from DSMC, Aleco Christakis from his new company in Philadelphia (CWA Ltd.), Mary Austin, John Warfield and possibly others.
This set of videos was an educational film made for training purposes. There is no copyright statement. Funding was supplied by a U.S. governmental agency (the Defense Systems Management College) in a contract with IASIS, George Mason University. Dr. John N. Warfield, principal investigator for the contract, donated the videotapes to GMU Library on 23 October 2000.
On Cassette Number 10 is an interview of John Warfield by Mary Austin, graduate student in Communications Department at George Mason University. In the raw footage of Warfield's interview he reveals his feelings about the strengths and weaknesses of the workshop, saying that it was successful, but could have been better in planning phases, especially with planning for follow-up sessions for developing solutions which could be applied to the mammoth problem structure of governmental acquisition.
Mary Austin was Prof. Ben Broome's student, working on a Master's degree. She did some, or maybe all of the filming for the DSMC workshop sessions, as part of her classwork under Ben's tutelage. Also (as John Warfield told me in March 2007) Mary Austin helped Henry in running the workshop sessions, and possibly she could have been working for DSMC while going to school at the same time, I don't know. I am writing these notes in 2007, trying to remember back to 1991, and this is as close to accurate as I can be.
For years I was unsure of the number of cassettes for this workshop. My record of the Oct 2000 shipment listed approximately 30 hours of video on eleven cassettes. But my inspection of the 2002 Fenwick Library electronic Finding Aid indicated there were ten cassettes with no mention of the Mary Austin interview, which worried me. It looked as if the interview was lost.
But finally, in 2004, I did find her interview when I visited Fenwick Library Special Collections and was allowed to search the video boxes. I found, in Box 66 at Fenwick, that there are tencassettes labeled Technical Managers Advanced Workshops but only nine of them are Interactive Management sessions, while the 10th TMAW cassette was the missing Mary Austin interview of John Warfield.
But not foundwas the eleventh cassette which I had shipped in October 2000. Cassette Number Eleven remained unaccounted for - until 2015 when my closer study of the Library catalog list revealed the missing Number Eleven, at last: It is listed by the Library as a VHS cassette titled "DSMC Workshop July 1991"in Box 84 of Special Collections! I am sure that title is the same as Mary Austin's 19 minute student project she called “Interactive Management Video” in which she used cutaways from Henry Alberts' TMAW Interactive Management sessions and from John's interview.
ACCOMPANYING MATERIALS:
1) Henry Albert's Ph.D. Dissertation titled “Redesigning the United States Defense Acquisition System,”which is in George Mason University Library, Call Number UC263 .A43 1995shelved in Special Collections, Fenwick Library.
2) A printed Report based on this Workshop titled "Technical Managers Advanced Workshops (TMAW 91-2): Redesigning the Defense Acquisition System-I, June 17-21, and July 23-24, 1991.
This note written 17 Feb 2007, is an enlargement of my earlier notes written in years 2000 and 2004. Further updated: 7 March 2007, 3 May 2012, 8 March 2013, and 30 September 2015.
(rw. 9/30/2015)
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