We spend a lot of time talking and about the federal hiring process and how long it takes. What gets less attention is the onboarding process: all the steps that have to happen once the hiring process is over to get new employees in a position to actually do their jobs.

Previous studies have shown the onboarding process is especially troublesome in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, a collection of 19 sub-organizations that tend to each do things their own way. From basic things like getting people signed up for benefits to issuing Common Access Cards and IT equipment, there’s not much of a structure in place to make the onboarding process efficient, so on average, it takes about 90 steps.

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks recently approved an implementation plan to modernize the onboarding process for OSD’s workforce. On this edition of On DoD, we’re joined by one of the officials will lead the effort: Danielle Metz, OSD’s chief information officer.

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It would be a bad idea for anyone to predict the exact year in which the Defense Department will relieve itself of its status as the only federal department unable to pass a financial audit. But the oversight body closest to the process seems to think there are glimmers of light at the end of what’s still a very long tunnel.

On this episode, a deep dive into where things stand with the DoD audit process. Our guests are Troy Robertson and Dr. Coralis Rodriguez with the DoD Inspector General's office. Both worked on the OIG's latest annual plain-language summary of the financial statement audit.

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This episode features two discussions from the 2024 Sea Air Space conference, starting with a focus on sustainment and logistics. Over the past several years, the Navy has been using a sweeping process improvement effort to wring almost a billion dollars in savings out of its supply chains under a project called Naval Sustainment System-Supply. Now, under a 2.0 version of NSS-Supply, the focus is changing – to boosting the readiness of the Navy’s ship and aircraft fleets. For more on how it’s all going, Jared Serbu talked with Commander Kirk Engler, the director of NSS-Supply at Naval Supply Systems Command, and Melissa Olson, the project’s deputy director.

Later on the show, we’ll have some highlights from a panel Jared moderated at this year’s Sea Air Space conference on digital transformation with senior leaders from the Coast Guard, Navy and Marine Corps.

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