… this kind of goes to those mid-level warfighter programs that guys really need, programs like Joint Improvised Explosive Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), Task Force (Odin) and things that we funded, because of immediate current threats that the warfighter has begged for, but that Congress almost has to force on the different services. And these programs start off agile and responsive, and they end up slow, unresponsive, bureaucratic.
And these are all programs where the ongoing operation is just as important as the initial acquisition of them.
And it seems like everything works well when it first starts off. It is lean and mean, and then it kind of gets out of control, once they get their billions and they hire 300 bureaucrats. Everything slows down and they become unresponsive, and they do not necessarily do what they were intended to do in the first place.
But that is more of an ongoing thing, but it still has to do with the initial acquisition and programs not doing what they are supposed to do after the initial acquisition.
That was Representative Duncan Hunter in the 2009 hearing, “Measuring Value and Efficiency.” I think we have the same debates today, with the fear that agile programs will not turn out very agile in the end. A related problem is that, as Hunter expressed elsewhere, contractors at the lower levels can take advantage of the process if not implemented well:
…everyone that I have talked to said there was indeed a permissive environment, and that contractors took advantage of it-not necessarily at the big level programs, but down at the lower levels, middle levels, and that that is being reined in now.
At least in the case of the Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Organization (JIDO), they were able to stay agile. JIDO has received some praise over the years (e.g., here and here). It requested about $163 million in the FY 2020 RDT&E appropriation. It seems to have relative freedom to allocate the funding across a wide range of applications, such as sensor development, various databases, prototypes and tests, AI, and more.
I suspect that the funding style, which is primarily organizational rather than programmatic, helps contribute to the success of Agile at JIDO. That suspicion is supported by Forrest Shull from Carnegie Mellon in a May 2019 vignette, Implementing Continuous Delivery: The JIDO Approach:
JIDO operates in an agile paradigm in which requirements can emerge and get reprioritized, it is difficult for the organization to justify budget requests upfront in the way that their command chain requires. JIDO addresses this today by creating notional, detailed mappings of functionality to release milestones. Since a basic principle of the approach is that capabilities being developed can be modified or re-prioritized with input from the warfighter, this predictive approach provides little or no value to the JIDO teams themselves. Even though JIDO refuses to map functionality in this way more than 2 years out, given that user needs can change significantly in that time, the program has had to add headcount just to pull these reports together.
JIDO has no problem showing value for the money spent. It is able to show numbers of users and, because it has personnel embedded with user communities, can discuss operational impact. As mentioned above, JIDO’s primary performance metric is “response from the theater.” Currently, JIDO faces a backlog of tasks representing additional demand for more of its services.
Read the whole thing.
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