We were seen as scurvy bastards who do nothing but steal, cheat and fool people, so we felt it was important for all of us to get a common understanding of what our goal was to make Paladin successful, he says. It was different from most team-building sessions because we actually worked issues related to how we would do work. From that we derived a series of principles and beliefs that we would use to operate the Paladin enterprise, Kotlanger says. Guiding the enterprise is a 3-inch thick binder containing the Paladin management plan, developed by staff from United Defense and the depot. It spells out responsibilities and procedures for virtually every aspect of the program.
Responsibilities are divided according to strengths of the partners.
United Defense assembles new turrets and integrates them with the chassis that have been refurbished by Letterkenny. Together they test the upgraded howitzers before United Defense delivers them to the field, shipping from the depot railhead. Managers from Letterkenny and United Defense say they deliberately set out to structure the program so that neither the government nor the contractor could be successful without the other, forcing a kind of teamwork that had not previously existed. But overcoming years of ingrained attitudes about how things should be done, as opposed to how they could be done better, was an all-consuming task initially, Nitterhouse says. Just as difficult was overcoming dozens of property management regulations that precluded integration of the workload.