Adaptive Acquisition Framework

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.