Development and Evaluation of an Intuitive Operations Planning Process for the Canadian Forces

This paper describes the development and evaluation of an intuitive planning process as an alternative to the Canadian Forces Operational Planning Process (CFOPP), a formal planning procedure based on analytical decision theory. The Intuitive Operations Planning Process (IOPP) is an iterative planning procedure, developed for this project, in which a single course of action is continually evaluated and refined. An experimental evaluation of the IOPP was conducted in which two planning teams performed two simulated planning tasks, once with the CFOPP and once with the IOPP. Results show that the IOPP outperformed the CFOPP in terms of efficiency, quality of planning products, usability, operational effectiveness, and workload, but was rated inferior in terms of trust and reliability, and the potential to lead to errors. It appears that the IOPP may be able to provide benefits to operational planning in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness and its use should therefore be further examined.