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NEWS FROM THE FRONT

January 2019

Knowledge Managers Perspective

Approved for Public Release

Distribution Unlimited

MAJ Elliot Miles

Military Analyst (forward)

Center for Army Lessons Learned

Creating a shared working environment: Insights from LTC Andrew Dugger

Knowledge Management Officer in Charge

III Armored Corps & CJTF-OIR
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News from the Front:

Knowledge Manager’s Perspective – Creating a Shared Working Environment: 

Insights from LTC Andrew Dugger KM OIC, III Corps & CJTF-OIR

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Center for Army Lessons Learned conducted a key leader interview (KLI) with LTC 

Andrew Dugger, Combined Joint Task Force – Operation INHERENT RESOLVE (CJFT-OIR) 

and III Armored Corps Knowledge Management (KM) Officer in Charge. LTC Dugger

facilitated the evolution of the CJTF-OIR headquarters (HQs). The U.S. Central Command 

directed CJTF-OIR to reduce its size while consolidating the Combined/Joint Force Land 

Component Command (CJLFCC)-OIR. The task resulted in the nesting of two unique battle 

rhythms while providing uninterrupted processes the operational tempo required to continue 

operations in theater to support operations in the greater Levant.

This News from the Front (NFTF) is a transcription of the KLI covering various topics ranging 

from issues requiring leaders to rethink training and skills among KM soldiers, programming or 

coding skills (not typically found in the U.S. Army training curriculums), and Scrum Master 

certification.

Key takeaways:

Minimize duplicative processes. Refining processes and procedures to maximize SharePoint 

provided the HQ one-calendar that is accessible from three different places: SharePoint, Outlook, 

and a Dashboard.

Standardize SharePoint ownership. The Army needs to examine how it is sourcing SharePoint 

training across the Army and identify a standard responsibility for who owns the SharePoint 

portals.

Placement of KM Specialist. Sustain the best practice of placing the KM Specialist under the 

chief of staff (CoS). This is reinforced in Army doctrine and modified table of organization and 

equipment (MTOE). 

Outstations. In a distributed environment, the staff must account for outstations in the battle 

rhythm. The CJTF-OIR meeting planning is a deliberate event to prevent forgetting outstations 

because it is easy to assume everything is coordinated/locked in.

These items address the adaptability and flexibility inherently needed in military operations. 

Additional details and insights are included within the base document.

Front Cover: New command center builds stronger relationships between Iraqi and coalition 

leaders, December 28, 2015. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. William Reinier)
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What insights do you have regarding transitions to a single HQs and a smaller footprint, 

sourced by a single Army HQ? 

The process to transition to a single headquarters started on Thanksgiving Day 2017, when the 

CoS asked the staff to start planning the headquarters merge with an Initial Operating Capability 

(IOC) date of 12 February 2018. The CoS placed this planning event in the CJ35-section so that 

an integrating staff could focus on the battle rhythm. The portion of this process where I have 

the most understanding is the battle rhythm merge. The insight I have is that [when] you have 

two different organizations with their two different functions where the CJTF focused on “up and 

out” (CJTF to CENTCOM and Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) (operational to 

strategic)) and CJFLCC focused on “down and in” (operational to tactical). The CoS chaired 

each planning event output briefing and brought the Council of Colonels (COC) together 

numerous times to ensure that all aspects of the new battle rhythm were addressed by directorate 

and sub-directorate perspectives. An example of the emphasis the CoS placed on this planning 

effort was how the OPT conducted a War Game, and after those results were socialized to the 

COC, there was an O6 war game. 

The CoS stated many times that “if” there was any risk, the planning team would accept risk on 

the “up and out” functions and no risk on the “down and in” functions. To emphasize this, the 

CJTF JOC was moved from Arifjan to Union III to ensure the “down and in” functions were 

accomplished. The command post (CP) in Kuwait became the Support CP, the CP in Erbil 

became the Tactical CP, and the CP at UIII became the Main CP. The CJTF staff was 

comfortable with CJTF to components but not as comfortable with the new perspective of doing 

both “up and out” and “down and in” due to the number of subordinate elements (59) with one 

battle rhythm. Headquarters-evolution (HQ-E) caused us to relook our task organization 

(FUOPS lead), reducing the number of subordinate (Direct Reporting Units) from 59 to around 

15. We understood “up and out” because that was our core function. Information from the staff 

flows up the chain of command and outside the organization to CENTCOM or different 

government agencies. However, there was a lot of work to get our arms wrapped around “down 

and in” because that was CJFLCC’s role. 

Now the HQ had to work both roles. Also, we wanted to make sure we did everything possible to 

reduce or minimize any issues when it came to the new merged HQ battle rhythm. The scope of 

this challenge was that we took 96 CJTF battle rhythm events and 87 CJFLCC battle rhythm

events and merged them into 144 events at the time of IOC in February 2018. When HQ 3.0 is 

finished being implemented, the HQ will be approximately the number of personnel from the 

original CJTF but conducting 1.5 times the number of meetings or battle rhythm events to fulfill 

the “up and out” as well as the “down and in” roles of HQ 3.0. In addition, CJ-KM led an effort 

to assess reporting and streamline the reporting process while allowing CUOPS to track all 

reports that came into and left the headquarters (subordinate units thru CJTF to CENTCOM). 

The two outputs from the reporting assessment was an updated consolidated reporting annex and 

a SharePoint solution that incorporated a reporting Dashboard on each classification enclave that 

provides “bins” for all reports by directorate with a calendar to facilitate CUOPS tracking. This 

effort resulted in discoverability of all reports to CJTF-OIR, the Command Group, and higher 

headquarters. 
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Define “up and out” and “in and down”

CJTF-OIR is a 3-star level headquarters with the responsibility of “up and out” coordination, 

synchronization, and integration of assets from CENTCOM, reporting to CENTCOM, other 

government agencies, and to Congress (operational to strategic). The “down and in” 

coordination, synchronization, and integration to support subordinate Task Forces with assets 

and reports and returns to accomplish their missions. Now, without a CJFLCC or 2-star division 

headquarters that focused on the “down and in”, we (CJTF-OIR) must also look “down and in”

to disseminate information to the operational or tactical realm of the O6 task force commanders. 

One of the things that requires a lot more “down and in” (operational to tactical) is logistics 

which is a great example of this transition. 

What were your challenges/successes with regard to Phase 1: Consolidate, Phase 2: Align, 

Phase 3: Re-balance?

We had to have the battle rhythm implemented with the start of the Align Phase per CG’s 

guidance. To do this our planning process required us to work backwards from the battle rhythm

anchor points. We started from the CG’s decision point events on the battle rhythm and built the 

battle rhythm backwards in order to account for the “up and out” and “down and in” functions 

that lead to those decisions. This allowed us to nest all the meetings into swim lanes or critical 

paths to decision based on function. Initially we started with four swim lanes or critical paths for 

the CG’s decision points that were force flow, operations & targeting, assessments, partner force 

development and key leader engagements, and requirements and sustainment. Because we 

started in late November and had to have this IOC by mid-February we had to capitalize on the 

buy in from the leadership to maximize the opportunity to rewrite the battle rhythm and rewrite 

all the processes/tools that supported the battle rhythm. We briefed the CoS at least four times 

and the Deputy Commanders at least twice, which was a forcing function to get the staff through 

all these gates to a rehearsal of concept (ROC) drill ten-days prior to implementation. This 

challenge became a success when we took manual processes and digital duplicative process on 

Power Point and Excel and refined them maximizing SharePoint so we could provide the HQ 

one calendar that is accessible from three different places: Share Point, Outlook, and a 

Dashboard. Now you can find the 7-Minute Drills, post meeting notes or slides on the 

appropriate enclave depending on the classification of the information from 3 clicks from the 

front page of the CJTF-OIR SharePoint pages (Highlighted by MG (Ret) Fabre from the JS/J7 

SAV MAY 2018 as a JTF best practice).

Another challenge was the availability of resources or conference rooms. About three weeks 

prior to the battle rhythm going live, we realized we hadn’t tied resources to events. This was a 

good epiphany and facilitated rebuilding the Union III (CJFLCC) conference room calendar and 

the CJTF (Arifjan (AJ)) conference room calendar. The team did a quick turn-around on 

rebuilding the conference room calendars starting from scratch with the goal of having every 

directorate and command group conference room availability on one site for AJ and one site for 

UIII. After the calendars were built, CJ-KM pre-populated battle rhythm events on the UIII and 

AJ calendars to force directorates to get used to a new overhead for each battle rhythm event 

which was coordinating for UIII and AJ conference rooms for each meeting. We refined the 

initial process with the directorates and provided a lock in date prior to the ROC drill with the 
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CoS. From the ROC drill to the IOC date, CJ-KM opened the calendars up to the Directorates in 

order for them to schedule internal meetings. Once the implementation date arrived, we removed 

the links for the old calendars and the new calendars went online. Surprisingly, the new battle 

rhythm implementation went off with only a few minor incidents, but no crashes. This success 

was due to the hard work of the entire staff and ensured that the new battle rhythm supported 

operations in Iraq and Syria. The HQ-E merged battle rhythm resulted in 144 events, one and a 

half times as many as before—but still fewer than the total number of events of the two separate 

HQs. However, due to rebuilding the management processes and access to information 

processes, CJ-KM was able to correct deficiencies, reduce friction points, and the end state is a 

new system that requires less time to manage the battle rhythm than the original processes.

Is there some skill or knowledge that would have been helpful to CJTF a year ago when 

you started the HQ Evolution planning?

If I had time to plan for HQ-E, I would’ve wanted a better understanding of project management 

and SharePoint implementation/capabilities. CJTF has the luxury of having a very robust 

contracted SharePoint team consisting of four Structured Query Language (SQL) developers and 

seven SharePoint front-end positions. The CJ-KM Deputy is an Italian Air Force IT officer. At 

home station, his position requires Program Management Professional (PMP) certification and 

Scrum Master Certifications. These are gates for project management in the civilian world. He 

also has coding skills and a great work ethic. I took the vision of our HQ on one battle rhythm

calendar and an issue in the ability to link SharePoint to Outlook with current battle rhythm 

colors and categories (Each General Officer has a different color on the calendar) as well as a 

partial solution that one of the SQL developers had created and provided to the CJ-KM Deputy. 

So, with my vision and a broken power shell script, a US Army Officer returned a finished 

product in less than two weeks. He fixed the broken PowerShell script that allows the input of 

battle rhythm colors and categories into Outlook. This allowed us to get the HQ to one battle 

rhythm calendar and we started doing tests with the Secretary of the Joint Staff and senior 

leaders’ computers to show we could get the HQ to one battle rhythm calendar. After this, we 

just ran with it by using the CJ-KM Knowledge Engineers to walk to every directorate and link 

all users to the battle rhythm calendar. We migrated as many people to one calendar as we could 

to reach the goal of shared understanding of the battle rhythm. What really made this work was 

the rework of all the systems for the battle rhythm during HQ-E. I call this one of the beauties of 

the coalition because we carried that into the merge of the battle rhythm and looked at every 

process from conference rooms to information flow. We knew we were going to be in a more 

distributed environment, which meant the digital system had to be functional and better than they 

were prior to HQ-E because in this environment the HQ had to be able to access information at 

any time in a distributed environment. 

If I had known a year ago that I was going to have these kind of challenges, I would’ve worked 

to source shortages in technical training (SharePoint management and Project Management). 

Fortunately, I had a great team, but even when I was the Director of Army Knowledge 

Management proponent at Fort Leavenworth, there seemed to be something missing. For 

example: I think we need to look at how we are sourcing SharePoint training across the Army. 

There is not a standard responsibility of who owns the SharePoint portals. In some 

organizations, the “6” or signal folks own the portal, and in some organizations the KM owns the 
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portal. Both areas require subject matter experts to utilize the digital collaborative tools 

effectively to share information and support the commander in reaching shared understanding. 

How are we sourcing who is doing the myriad of tasks associated with SharePoint and KM tasks. 

What kind of training is necessary for KM? When I go back to III Corps, we have two 

contractors who cannot deploy to support SharePoint portals on non-classified internet protocol 

router network, secret internet protocol router network, and tactical networks. So who fills this 

technical void at the Division and Corps-level during a deployment if there is no pre-existing 

contract? What does the Corps or Division headquarters do? The three Corps headquarters are 

working solutions at each headquarters, but solutions involve contracting for SharePoint subject 

matter experts. This is a known issue at echelons above brigade that I believe needs to be 

addressed by the MCCoE and Cyber CoE. 

I would recommend all Division KM sections contract for at least 2 SharePoint contractors and 

at the Corps level, contract for at least 5 SharePoint contractors. The reason for the large number 

of contractors is that in a mission partner environment, where there are multiple networks, 

SharePoint sites are broken out by classification resulting in 3 times the number of sites that units 

are used to operating at home station. Contractor support is critical to develop and sustain 

SharePoint sites where information can be shared and staff elements/subordinate units can 

collaborate. 

In addition, KMO training on project management and change management are necessary 

aspects that need to be expanded other than just an overview class at the KM Qualification 

Course at Fort Leavenworth. Understanding how to keep a project on track that is being 

developed to resolve a requirement gap for the headquarters is a key function of a Knowledge 

Manager. Scrum Master training is a potential way to help resolve this training gap. 

Recommend having Knowledge Managers get certified in as a Scrum Master 

(https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-a-scrum-master ) 

What do you want to tell the rest of the Army regarding lessons learned?

I would say do three things: #1) Identify your KM section early in the training cycle is key. 

#2) The bigger piece is aligning the KM section under the CoS. The CJTF-OIR KM section

would not have been able to accomplish the myriad of projects over the last year without being 

aligned under the CoS which is current Army doctrine and MTOE. At this time, there is not a 

definition for KM in joint doctrine. This needs to be resolved. By Army doctrine and MTOE the 

KM section is under the CoS and it works. #3) Resource the SharePoint SMEs to align to your 

mission. Also, if there is the ability to integrate Project Management (PM) whether it is Scrum 

Master training or PMP Certification. At a minimum Scrum and/or some sort of PM type of 

change management schooling should be integrated better into your KM section’s training. 

At the Army KM Qualification Course they conduct a block of instruction on change 

management, but could better address Project Management. Share Point is not taught at all. So 

this generates a division KM section, for example in OSS, who shows up to Kuwait and gets told 

he is going to manage and code the Division SharePoint page. This has to be on the job training 

due to never being taught SharePoint before. It happens all the time in COMPO 1, 2, and 3 units 

and this challenge should be addressed.
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What is the operational impact to consolidation and ‘rebalance’ of HQs?

The operational impact for the staff is the number of outstations, in our distributed environment. 

The impact right now is it is easy to forget to dial in an outstation. Due to this, the CJTF-OIR 

meeting planning is a deliberate event to prevent forgetting outstations because it is easy to 

assume everything is coordinated/locked in. Operating in a distributed environment must be 

accounted for to conduct meetings from internal to external to battle rhythm events and clearly 

identify the people who need to attend. Establish an execution checklist to ensure all events have 

a conference room, dial-in info, and a VTC bridge is coordinated. Meeting and battle rhythm

event planning is now a deliberate effort because of the distributed environment. This HQ had to 

get smart on digital meeting tools like Skype, Microsoft Link, and Defense Collaboration 

Services (DCS) to hold meetings or training events. For example, the foreign disclosure officer 

utilized DCS to train foreign disclosure representatives. 

Do you have anything else to add? Any lessons learned or anything specific to HQ 

Evolution?

There are some very good technical lessons learned that we will write up for the CJTF-OIR

lessons learned documents. We are one of the first HQs to use SharePoint for records 

management to become Department of Defense Instruction 5015.2 (DoD Records Management 

Program) compliant. 

Processes put in place such as reporting Dashboards and battle rhythm processes need to be 

shared. 

There are other aspects of the organizational touchpoints for KM that are best practices:

 Have Knowledge Engineers in the JOC (Day and Night). 

 Have Knowledge Engineers from CIDNE in the CJ2. 

 Have CIDNE FSRs in both JOCs (UIII and AJ). 

 Have a MITRE contractor at AJ. 

 Have SharePoint SMEs at the CJTF-OIR Main and Rear HQs

The MITRE contractor allows us to throw strategic-type of problems at them; like the harder, 

Ph.D. level, long-term type process issues. For example, they are building a battle rhythm

assessment support system. Right now there is not a materiel solution for digital battle rhythm

assessment. The JECC (Joint Enabling Capabilities Command) is the SME on battle rhythm

assessments, but they use Excel and stubby pencil method for their assessments. There is no 

current requirement from the JECC to develop a digital battle rhythm assessment tool. There is a

requirement however from the Army KM Proponent and this HQ due to the volume of battle 

rhythm events. So some of the problems we throw at MITRE are those bigger, long-range 

projects. Having the ability to have long term projects worked by MITRE vice knowledge 

engineers or individuals in key staff sections provides flexibility for project management in a 

JTF. This allows the SharePoint team, who can implement or build almost anything a Senior 

Leader can visualize has been a powerful mix to tackle projects and bridge gaps for this HQ. 
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BG Kamper asked us to build a force management tool. To build this tool, we needed a SQL 

database. We chose CIDNE WEBTAS due to the capability of not only having an existing SQL 

structured database, but also the web interface for display. This is a non-standard use of CIDNE 

WEBTAS to visualize units and aggregate capability across the CJOA. This system pulls from 

our daily status report (DSR) for the HQ and integrates the DSR Dashboard, which is an output 

from deployed theater accountability system, from subordinate units. This tool, even though it is 

a nonstandard use for WEBTAS, is powerful system. The PM from CIDNE actually bought in 

and said we can use WEBTAS for this non-standard task. These are just a few of the best 

practices that are in place and only possible due to the contract team that supports KM in CJTFOIR.

In addition, I recommend HQs develop a type of knowledge center (see below) for basic formats 

and information for the staff to reside. In CJTF-OIR, there is a constant churn of personnel and 

KM supports information flow/integration into the organization by providing how to guides for 

systems/tools available to the staff, basic Microsoft Office how to guides, and formats for the 

organization for key products (OPORDs, PowerPoint slide formats, memorandums, etc.). 
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Figure 1: KM SharePoint Portal Page
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Figure 2: SharePoint Operational Function Tab

Figure 3: SharePoint Administrative Function Tab

Figures 1, 2, and 3 represent examples the CJTF-OIR KM team developed to provide the HQs easy access to a variety of 

information on SharePoint.