ABSTRACT
In other industries, performance-based contracting has been the touchstone for successful response to bidding and procurement going back to the 1940s when World War II produced frantic activity to produce services and goods for the military. As the standards and specifications for everything from helmets to tanks came down from Washington, D.C., government contractors bid on price and quality. This created the platform for a very complicated series of projects surrounding the refinement of specifications based upon feedback from the field as to what was or was not working. This was originally part of the intelligence gathering process that grew to become operations research. It also became a focal point in the engineering sequence as to why select specifications were used. This feedback loop was fed back to contractors and reflected in the specifications for the next version of products. Thus, the specific issue of connecting one version of a product to the next was encountered. (Examples: electrical outlets changed, but lighting fixtures did not; a need to upgrade ammunition to reduce cost was met by one contractor, but the development of the rifle was not changed.)
