Adaptive Acquisition Framework

April 1, 2020 By cs

Today’s complexities demand more chefs, fewer cooks

If you’re a cook, you had better become a chef!

Do you know the difference?

A cook can follow a recipe and prepare a nice meal, but a chef can take a variety of wide-ranging ingredients, understand how they complement each other, and create a gourmet feast.

Have you ever watched “Chopped” on the Food Network? Each chef contestant is given a basket of eclectic ingredients and a challenging schedule to fix an epicurean dish that their customers, the judges, will fawn over.

Sound familiar? We live in an increasingly complex acquisition world where just following a Department of Defense Instruction (DoDI) 5000.02 recipe will not suffice to provide your customer, the Warfighter, with the “dish” needed for success. For example, if you were to have taken the Defense Acquisition University’s Intermediate Systems Acquisition course 10 years ago, you would have been shown a single, phased-approach model, the Defense Acquisition Management System (shown below in Figure 1).

Five years later, with a recognition that software is developed and procured differently than hardware, DoDI 5000.02’s refresh would have exposed you to six different models, a combination of hardware and software-dominant paths. An appreciation that the break between phases is not a smooth process led to the revamping of the hardware model, as well (Figure 2).

Today, our acquisition world’s complexity has expanded even more, recognizing that different situations require different urgencies, tools, and solutions. This has resulted in the Adaptive Acquisition Framework, whose latest draft includes the 2019 DoDI 5000.02 process as only one of the six potential paths to acquiring the best Warfighter solution (Figure 3).

You need to become a chef! Gone are the days of being able to simply follow the prescribed Milestone A, B, C recipe. But how to make the change? First, you need to understand the circumstances presented to you. What is the “speed of relevance” for your program? How flexible and/or stable are the requirements? Have you established an enduring conversation with your customer to discuss requirements options? Then you will need to apply a thorough understanding of the major ingredients that will spell success or failure for any program. What are they? Let me suggest the following as a start.

Acquisition Pathway

Where does your effort fit into the new Adaptive Acquisition Framework? Are you trying to exploit some new innovative technology and provide the Warfighter with residual operational capabilities? Explore the Middle-Tier Acquisition (MTA) Rapid Prototyping path. Is there some proven technology, perhaps exploiting a commercial use, that you can produce quickly and field within 5 years? If so, then, MTA’s Rapid Fielding path might be right for you. Is software the major acquisition product, perhaps an upgrade to a command and control product? Why not follow the Software Acquisition path? Of course, there is nothing evil about the traditional Major Capability Acquisition path, which can and should be tailored to meet your specific needs. But it is crucial that you understand the requirements and benefits, along with the risks, of taking these different acquisition pathways, and then choose the pathway most appropriate for your program.

Contracting Strategy

Congress recently expanded some tools for finding and getting the right defense industry contractor on-board for our programs. Beyond traditional contracting vehicles based on the Federal Acquisition Regulation, Other Transactions (OTs), and Commercial Solutions Openings (CSOs) have provided some great additional options. Are they right for your program? Does your program meet the Three Ps of OTs — purpose, prototype, and participation? Many of your colleagues have embraced these contract vehicles, as evidenced by a rapid increase in OT use over the past several years. However, beware of statements that imply one contract vehicle is superior to all others. Some dishes need salt, and some need sugar. Just because both flavorings are white granular substances doesn’t mean it is appropriate to use them interchangeably. A good understanding of contract strategy differences can mean the difference between success and failure. If risk is too high and you’ve demanded a fixed price contract, industry proposals will reflect that. In such a case, you can likely gain flexibility and save money using a cost-reimbursable vehicle. You can often save time using an OT, but not always. The experts say that if you’re using OTs for the sole purpose of saving time, don’t! Always remember the reason you choose a particular contracting vehicle is to properly incentivize the contractor to provide your end users with the product they need, when they need it.

Funding Strategy

How will you get the money to run your program? Beyond the traditional Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution (PPBE) system that requires 2 years of foresight for acquiring funds, are there other sources of more immediate funding? Are you aware that the DoD has a Rapid Prototyping Fund administered by the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering? Could that bridge the 2-year gap between a great technological opportunity now and establishing your long-term funding line through PPBE? If you can go faster via additional funds, have you explored getting on your service’s Unfunded Requirements List or pursued Reprogramming Requests? You need a thorough grasp of all of your options to get the required money, in the right appropriations, at the right time. Depending on your total budget, you will have a variety of reporting and accountability requirements. Have you accounted for those in your timelines? Can they be waived, when appropriate? Understanding your program deeply enough to predict the funds needed, in the appropriations category needed, will allow your team to ensure the money is available in time.

System Engineering, Metrics, and Risk/Opportunity Management

What is your path to getting the technical solution to work? Are you prototyping the hard stuff first — i.e., “the quickest path to failure,” as Dr. Bruce Jette, the Army’s Acquisition Executive would say. One of the most important system engineering tasks is to develop and maintain a rigorous risk and opportunity management plan. With today’s need for products to be delivered at the speed of relevance, it is essential that your team thoroughly recognizes the risks facing the proposed solution. How can those risks be mitigated? Will they be assumed, transferred, controlled, or avoided? And don’t forget about opportunities. Are any available that would increase speed or performance? What resources are needed to enable pursuit of those opportunities?

This risk/opportunity management plan is not to be built and put on a shelf, but to serve as a steady guide as the product matures. If your product is software, do you understand the Risk Management Framework and how to best exploit its virtues to improve your software product? Is agile software development the right methodology for getting your software matured and in the users’ hands? If not, why not? A good strategy for developing the technical solution for the warfighter’s requirement is essential to your program’s success.

Integrated Testing

Employing a collaborative effort with the warfighter and tester, have you established a test and evaluation plan to ensure that your product meets that customer’s needs? What type of testing does your product and chosen acquisition path demand? A program manager’s worst nightmare is to contract for a product and successfully execute that product, only for the warfighter or tester to find it inadequate. If you follow a rapid prototyping pathway, you should engage in a test-learn-fix-test approach with multiple user test points in a series of small, targeted events, while maximizing modeling and simulation to increase your speed. A Test and Evaluation Master Plan will be required for the traditional Major Capability Acquisition approach; however, you should tailor it to increase testing’s influence on your development efforts. Like many of the functional offices, these vital activities can appear to program managers as impediments. However, they serve a vital role. Engaging with them early and developing a common understanding of schedule and technical requirements can foster an environment of mutual support toward the common goal of getting war-winning technology faster into the hands of the warfighters. Still, you also need to ensure that it stays in their hands. So, it is crucial that you track sustainment and producibility, starting early in the design process.

Sustainment and Producibility

One of the potential pitfalls of the rapid prototyping path could be the neglect of production and sustainment costs in the effort to ensure that the product reaches residual operational capability within the 5-year window dictated by Congress. Studies have shown that, by the time the Preliminary Design Review is conducted, approximately 80 percent of the program’s life-cycle cost (LCC) is determined, even though only a small percentage of the program’s cumulative costs has been spent. This early design work is the place where the team has the best opportunity to impact LCC. By the time of the Critical Design Review, the LCC commitment is approximately 90 percent (Figure 4).

Production, logistics, and other considerations must be exhaustively understood and prioritized early or your program could easily become unaffordable. Prototyping emphasizes an experimental philosophy in order to get innovative technology to work. Without a strong program manager emphasis, there is little incentive to focus on future LCC drivers — i.e., production, operations, and support. Also, award fee contracts, which allow for profit margins to be influenced subjectively, and to include consideration of items such as affordability and sustainability, are highly discouraged. This may dissuade the government/contractor team from paying much heed to these longer-term factors. Like a chef who has visualized the flavor and presentation of the final dish early in the cooking process, your team must emphasize sustainment and producibility early in the design process to ensure that the final product is technologically superior, producible, and affordably sustainable.

As a former senior manager of manufacturing at one of our industry partners, which produced the interiors of the canceled VH-71 Presidential Helicopter, I can testify how early design decisions can subvert manufacturing’s ability to produce an affordable product.

Yes, a number of other factors must be decided on, managed, and tracked in order to produce a successful product for our warriors. Your team cannot forget to ensure the myriad other elements—such as environment, safety, and occupational health, spectrum certification, airworthiness, unique identifiers, energy policy, etc.—that must all be addressed for the program to succeed. However, the thorough understanding and vetting the above six major ingredients will allow you to master the complexities of today’s acquisition world. With that mastery, you will no longer feel the need to open up the DoDI 5000.02 cookbook to find the recipe for creating a good product. Instead, when you open up the basket of ingredients that the requirements and acquisition community has handed you, you’ll be able to create a gourmet, masterful acquisition strategy. Bon Appétit!

David Riel is the author of this article, first published in the March-April 2020 issue of Defense Acquisition magazine. Riel is professor of Acquisition Management at the Defense Acquisition University in Kettering, Ohio. He formerly had a 20-year career with the U.S. Air Force, including work with industry. The author can be contacted at David.RIel@dau.edu.

February 17, 2020 By cs

The paths become clearer: DoD acquisition policy and the Adaptive Acquisition Framework

The Honorable Ellen Lord, Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition and Sustainment), has repeatedly stressed that one of her office’s primary goals is to reform Defense acquisition so that it delivers capabilities at the speed of relevance to our Warfighters.

Since Dec. 31, Lord has approved the release of all six acquisition pathways that make up the Adaptive Acquisition Framework (AAF), DoD’s long-awaited rewrite of the Defense Acquisition directives commonly referred to as the “5000 series.”

Reforming this cumbersome set of documents has been a priority for Lord, who has been introducing the concepts to Congress, the defense industry, and the Defense Acquisition Workforce for several months.

“[The] way forward removes a longstanding system of bureaucracy and red tape by turning the procurement process into one that empowers users to be creative decision makers and problem solvers,” she wrote in a recent Defense Acquisition magazine article recently reprinted here by the Contracting Education Academy at Georgia Tech.

The revised 5000 series includes the introduction of the AAF, which gives acquisition professionals six different acquisition pathways: Urgent Capability Acquisition, Middle Tier of Acquisition, Major Capability Acquisition, Acquisition of Services, Defense Business Systems, and Interim Software Acquisition.

The final step of the release process involves an intricate transition that will occur when the Department of Defense Instruction (DoDI) 5000.02, “Operation of the Adaptive Acquisition Framework,” is released. This new version of the 5000.02 will cancel the current 5000.02, “Operation of the Defense Acquisition System.”

Because of differences in the two documents, functional policies applicable to engineering, test, cost, etc. will be nullified. To mitigate the gap, DoDI 5000.02T (T stands for transition), “Operation of the Defense Acquisition System,” will be published to facilitate a smooth transition to AAF operations and will remain in effect until the completion of the AAF realignment.

Below are the policies that comprise the redesigned DoD 5000 series:

DoD Instruction 5000.2, Operation of the Adaptive Acquisition Framework, Jan. 23, 2020
DoD Instruction 5000.02T, Operation of the Defense Acquisition System, Jan. 23, 2020
DoD Instruction 5000.74, Defense Acquisition of Services, Jan. 10, 2020
Software Acquisition Pathway Interim Policy and Procedures, Jan. 3, 2020
DoD Instruction 5000.75, Business Systems Requirements and Acquisition, Jan. 24, 2020
DoD Instruction 5000.81, Urgent Capability Acquisition, Dec. 31, 2019
DOD Instruction 5000.80 Operation of the Middle Tier of Acquisition (MTA), Dec. 30, 2019

Defense acquisition professionals are advised to check DoD’s AAF website often for the latest policy updates.

January 24, 2020 By cs

Leaning forward into the new year

In this article, originally published in the Jan.-Feb. 2020 issue of Defense Acquisition magazine, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition & Sustainment Ellen Lord talks about her reorganized department’s quest to use innovative techniques to expeditiously and cost-effectively deliver the goods and services needed by U.S. warfighters.

A new year has begun for our team. We continue using the momentum built thus far to propel us forward. Take a look at where we have come from. On Feb. 1, 2018, we stood up the new Acquisition and Sustainment (A&S) organization as mandated by Congress — and on Sept. 4, 2018, we had our first official day as a reorganized department. Of course, we used this opportunity to better shape our organization and acquisition system to meet the demands of the 21st century. Even while leadership has changed, our mission endures: Enable the Delivery and Sustainment of Secure and Resilient Capabilities to the Warfighter and Internal Partners Quickly and Cost Effectively. Our National Defense Strategy was instrumental as we built departmental norms and strategy.

A&S employees at all levels are driving the organization forward together, full speed ahead with several significant projects.

For starters, the Adaptive Acquisition Framework has been introduced, along with a rewrite of what had become a cumbersome document, the Department of Defense (DoD) Instruction 5000 Series. This way forward removes a longstanding system of bureaucracy and red tape by turning the procurement process into one that empowers users to be creative decision makers and problem solvers. The acquisition workforce will choose between a set of established pathways and timelines — specifically designed for a diversity of purchases — requiring different levels of urgency. Using the new policy, acquisition professionals will be given autonomy, within legal parameters, to churn up tailored solutions. All of these revisions should allow for DoD partnerships with commercial industry in real time, enabling the DoD to keep products up to date with emerging technologies, and delivering capabilities “at the speed of relevance.”

Program Sustainment

Improving program sustainment outcomes for the F-35 fighter jet is another top priority for A&S. Developed to replace multiple U.S. fighter jets with a platform that maximizes commonality, and therefore economies of scale, the DoD has fielded three configurations to satisfy United States Air Force, United States Marine Corps, United States Navy and multiple international partners’ tactical aircraft requirements. A&S is dedicated to achieving the DoD’s aim for an 80 percent mission capability rating by defining performance imperatives, metrics, establishing detailed success elements and applying commercial best practices. These efforts help ensure a ready and affordable fleet of fifth-generation fighters critical to preserving air dominance both for the United States and our allied partners in this era of strategic competition.

Software Development

Like anywhere else, DoD systems are enabled by hardware but are defined by the software used. With the technology industry innovating quickly, the DoD must figure out how to keep up with fast moving software development and life cycles. By engaging Agile and DevOps methods for more iterative processing, end users will be involved earlier and more often, enabling continuous integration and helping the DoD meet its goal to develop and sustain software simultaneously. Based on recommendations by the Defense Innovation Board, a new software acquisition policy of approaching the challenge from the business side is being finalized to allow for these more rapid techniques. Pilot programs are rolling out to define corresponding procedures even further. Along these lines, the DoD has asked Congress to specifically appropriate money for defense software and is awaiting budget review and National Defense Authorization Act spending decisions.

Cybersecurity

The Cyber Security Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) was developed (using the best industry standards) to ensure the cyber hygiene of the Defense Industrial Base is complete and protects critical information in the DoD. As part of the CMMC, a consortium of unbiased parties will oversee the training, quality and administration of a third party that will certify that industrial base partners uphold accepted standards. This effort was spearheaded by our Acquisition team in working to roll out version 0.6 of the model by November 2019 and version 1.0 by the first of this year. The consortium is to begin training and accreditation of certifiers with certification beginning by June. Contracts will be required to include this certification in their evaluation criteria, beginning this October.

Chemicals

Chemical agents Perfluorooctane Sulfonate (PFOS) and Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) are part of a larger chemical class known as Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Following a health advisory issued by the Environmental Protection Agency that warned against PFAS chemicals in drinking water, studies discovered the presence of the harmful agents in many industrial and consumer products, including nonstick cookware and microwave popcorn bags.

In DoD applications, the chemicals have been found in firefighting foam used to rapidly extinguish fuel fires. Although successful in protecting against catastrophic loss of life and property, it is now known that the release of PFAS can potentially contaminate private wells and public water systems. A national committee and a task force were established to provide an aggressive, holistic approach to find and fund an effective substitute for firefighting foam without PFAS, develop and implement cleanup standards, make lasting policy change, and coordinate across federal agencies. The DoD discontinued land-based use of the firefighting foam in training, testing and maintenance. Now, when the foam is used in emergencies to save lives, releases are treated as a chemical spill. Affected soil is contained and removed, to ensure that no additional PFAS pollute the groundwater. The DoD has identified 36 drinking water systems containing unsafe PFOS and PFOA — some of those systems are servicing military installations and surrounding communities. In an effort to protect these areas, A&S is using investigative data to prioritize the U.S. Government’s actions in appropriately addressing drinking water issues caused by DoD activities.

Alignment

Going forward, the A&S organization will continue aligning itself to support the DoD’s top priorities. These projects, and many others, are critical pieces that fit together into the much larger goals of defending the country and arming the Warfighter.

Source: https://www.dau.edu/library/defense-atl/DATLFiles/Jan-Feb2020/DEFACQ%20Jan-Feb%202020.pdf

April 23, 2019 By AMK

What’s your acquisition approach — FAR or non-FAR?

You’re a program or project manager facing myriad choices when it comes to the acquisition process. Should you use a traditional Federal Acquisition Regulation-based model? Or perhaps an other transaction authority?

A rapid prototyping-rapid fielding approach? Which type of contracting strategy should you use—a task order/delivery order? A blanket purchase agreement?

Finding the best approach is now a little less murky thanks to a set of acquisition digital prototypes produced by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (OUSD(A&S)) and MITRE Corp. and hosted on the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) website.

The acquisition digital prototypes—the Adaptive Acquisition Framework and the Contracting Cone, as well as an Other Transactions (OT) Guide — were rolled out in late 2018, and are easy-to-use, interactive tools.

The Adaptive Acquisition Framework shows the many different paths an acquisition program can follow and lets users click through the details for each path. Additional pathways, tailored models and new content will be added over time.

The Contracting Cone outlines the full spectrum of Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and non-FAR contract strategies, and supporting materials provide details about each strategy. The goal of the tool is to provide visibility into new or lesser-known strategies and ensure that the full range of contract strategies is considered. Eventually, “our hope is that every part of the cone will be clickable,” said Samuel N. Parks, communications and program analyst at DAU.

The Other Transactions (OT) Guide provides an overview of OTs — legal acquisition instruments other than contracts, grants or cooperative agreements that offer a streamlined method for carrying out prototype projects and transitioning successes into follow-on production—in addition to real-world examples. The guide also includes 10 “myth busters” that debunk some of the most common misconceptions about OTs.

Also available on the DAU website is a 10-episode “Other Transaction Mythbusting Video Series” by DAU Professor Diane Sidebottom, who came to DAU from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was involved in writing the OT Guide. Congress first authorized the use of OTs in 1958, with the legislation that created NASA. Congress allowed DARPA to use OTs in 1989, and their use was extended to the military services in 1996.

Feedback on the prototypes has been “really positive,” said Parks. Nearly 20,000 users have visited the website since it went live in December, he said, and several users across DOD plan to incorporate the tools into contracting and acquisition training programs.

IT’S ALL ABOUT OPTIONS

The acquisition digital prototype was driven by Ben FitzGerald and others in the OUSD(A&S). (FitzGerald has since left the Pentagon for a private business opportunity.) FitzGerald is a former senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and Senate Armed Services Committee staffer who was brought to the Pentagon in December 2017 by the Hon. Ellen M. Lord, the USD(A&S), to oversee the splitting of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics into the USD(A&S) and the USD for Research and Engineering. As a Senate staffer, FitzGerald helped write a requirement in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2018 for “digitized acquisition policy.” The prototype on the DAU website is an outgrowth of that policy.

“One of the things that we are attempting to do as we implement acquisition reforms is to provide a more flexible acquisition framework, which is where we’ve come up with this concept of an adaptive acquisition framework that allows programs to apply the right tools, the right acquisition policy, the right contracting tool, to the program that they are running. Because we recognize that there’s a wide variety of programs and multiple valid ways to deliver those programs,” FitzGerald told Army AL&T in December. “So in seeking to do that in terms of seeking to provide more options, we needed to find ways to communicate those options in a way that is hopefully easily understood and easy to share and communicate.”

Spurred by acquisition reforms built into the NDAAs passed by Congress from FY16 through FY19 —“There is a historic quantity of acquisition reform in those NDAAs,” FitzGerald said — the USD(A&S) “wanted to focus on being a data-driven policy and governance organization. And we saw, as we shifted to that, we felt the need to have ways to communicate our policy in more flexible ways and in ways that allowed us to do easier analysis of the policy itself.”

More online tools are on the way, beginning with one on middle-tier acquisition, although the timing is uncertain.

The focus from the get-go was collaboration and simplification, FitzGerald said. “When we did the OT guide, we intentionally brought in representatives from DARPA, from the Defense Innovation Unit, from DASA(P) [Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Procurement] within the Army, equivalent organizations in the Air Force and Navy, from DAU, to make sure that we were writing a product that was optimized for the users … you know, the people who were actually going to be agreements officers, or who were in industry trying to understand how the agreements will get put together, those types of things.”

DAU’s role as a “central hub for acquisition knowledge” was particularly important, FitzGerald said. “We want to make sure that they are involved in all of that policy development so that they can inform us, as the policy writers, on what they’re learning from students, what students are saying, and those types of things. And so that they understand from the outset how we were thinking about developing the policy, so they can communicate that back to their students, almost in real time.”

CONCLUSION

In the end, though, it’s the acquisition workforce that will decide the future of such prototyping efforts. “So what we’re seeking to learn over the course of this year is how much does the acquisition workforce value these types of tools?” FitzGerald said. “Because if we want to do that on an ongoing basis, it’s going to require a lot of effort to make sure that everything is up to date and consistent and internally linked and all of that.

“So we’re putting it out there as a prototype and if the acquisition workforce really values it, then we’ll be able to make an argument for further investment in it. But if the acquisition workforce is fine with PDFs, then we can keep doing that, too.”

For more information, go to the DAU website at https://www.dau.mil.

This article was written by Michael Bold who provides contract support to the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center. This article was published with the title “At Your Fingertips” in the Spring issue of Army AL&T magazine.