Not later than February 1, 2020, each Service Acquisition Executive shall recommend to the Secretary of Defense at least one major defense acquisition program for a pilot program to include tailored measures to streamline the entire milestone decision process, with the results evaluated and reported for potential wider use.
That was Section 831 of the FY 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. Today is February 1. Who are the lucky programs?
Congress lays these types of things on the Department of Defense by the hundreds. I wonder what they had in mind? Presumably, having known that the DoD was in the midst of releasing its adaptive acquisition framework, Congress intended Section 831 to streamline the traditional 5000.01 milestone review process (called Major Capability Acquisition pathway) along with its 5000.02 documentation. Perhaps if this slims down enough, then there will be less incentive to take the Urgent Capabilities, Software, or Middle-Tier pathways.
What is frustrating about the NDAA dictates is that they demand streamlining at the same time that they emphasize oversight and process. Congress should rather provide explicit top-cover to go use existing authorities and take risk.
Here’s the rest of Section 831’s text:
Each pilot program selected pursuant to subsection (a) shall include the following elements:
(1) Delineating the appropriate information needed to support milestone decisions, assuring program accountability and oversight, which should be based on the business case principles needed for well-informed milestone decisions, including user-defined requirements, reasonable acquisition and life-cycle cost estimates, and a knowledge-based acquisition plan for maturing technologies, stabilizing the program design, and ensuring key manufacturing processes are in control. (2)Developing an efficient process for providing this information to the milestone decision authority by—
(A) minimizing any reviews between the program office and the different functional staff offices within each chain of command level; and (B) establishing frequent, regular interaction between the program office and milestone decision makers, in lieu of documentation reviews, to help expedite the process.
The Pentagon recently released a new DoDI 5000.02, which relegated many enclosures to external instructions. It is a slimmer document, but that doesn’t mean many of the same processes don’t still exist elsewhere. We will see whether the streamlined process used for the pilot programs is simply the anticipated rejiggering of the Major Capability pathway.
Sort of tangential, but I wonder how the DoD plans to square their insane fascination with the Agile-base software acquisition process with the various regulation-driven publications processes. Validation and verification for publications just doesn’t lend itself to the Agile model as it’s unrealistic to attempt to verify a partial publication. Especially using IETMs, when one part of a Tech Manual links out to another part or possibly another manual in the same series (say a -23 linking to procedures in the related -10), it’s impossible to validate/verify the -23 until the linked portion of the -10 has been through val/ver. And, both manuals could easily change as a result of subsequent Agile sprint efforts on the associated software product.