Massive ABMS contract to an unknown 5-person firm [UPDATED]

Under the $950,000,000 award ceiling, Hellebore will support the maturation, demonstration, and proliferation of capability across platforms and domains to enable Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2). The contract provides for the development and operation of systems as a unified force across all domains (air, land, sea, space, cyber, and electromagnetic spectrum) in an open architecture family of systems.

 

Hellebore will lead the way in disrupting antiquated approaches to all-domain network-centric warfare. “The technology we have proposed for ABMS is a generational leap over what our adversaries are capable of,” said John Farrier, CEO.

That was from a short announcement, Hellebore Consulting Group Awarded $950M ABMS Contract.

[Update: Alex informs me that it is a multiple award task order contract. Will be a mix of various types of firms including Lockheed and Northrop. This makes sense. See here. I’m thinking the award came out of this Broad Agency Announcement, read the FAQs. “Our intent is to establish a “pool” of contractors for each category who will compete for requirements under that category via the Fair Opportunity process.” The Air Force will keep its options open to use competitive vs. negotiated and cost-plus vs. fixed price contract structures.]

What is Hellebore Consulting Group? They have zero transactions with the government in FPDS. Almost nothing is known about them on sites like Zoom info. Their LinkedIn profile shows only 5 people, 3 of which used to work at Booz Allen Hamilton including their CEO John Farrier who spent a career there. Here he is talking about modeling and simulation. Hellebore’s background with Booz Allen Hamilton is interesting considering Booz recently was awarded an $800 million contract for artificial intelligence.

Whatever Hellebore did to demo capabilities for ABMS, it must’ve been pretty darn convincing. ABMS’ FY 2021 budget request is $302 million, less than one-third the ceiling of this contract. Of course, other program offices interacting with ABMS might use it as a convenient vehicle as well. Here are some speculations about the program strategy:

1. Systems Engineering. Perhaps Hellebore could act something like Ramo-Woolridge did during Polaris, where the company supported the government’s lead in systems development. The consulting firm doesn’t manage the contractors performing the work itself. The government still contracts separately and maintains a great deal of technical responsibility. The consulting firm largely helps orchestrating the various activities to ensure integration. In this capacity, Hellebore may be something like the staff of ABMS’ Chief Architect. However, given the size of this contract — and the fact their announcement says “development and operations” — I don’t think this is the model being used.
2. Traditional Prime. Perhaps Hellebore Consulting is being groomed to act like traditional primes such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and so forth. Hellebore may be expected to be the lead systems integrator and control most of the subcontracting. Given the open systems architecture, perhaps Hellebore itself creates the “platform” and then manages various competing subcontractors who develop layers of applications. Perhaps something like half or more of ABMS funds flow through Hellebore. There is some plausibility to this model. A traditional large SDD/EMD contract may be broken down into numerous task orders which allows the Air Force to retain technical responsibility and ability to pivot the requirements. But for this role, Hellebore is something of a head scratcher.
3. Contract Broker. Another way to conceive of the contract is as if it were something like an OTA consortium manager. The Air Force has stated they want to involve many contractors and use continuous competition. But the government’s version of competition is really long and burdensome. One way around this is to create a massive contract with an intermediary, who in effect manages the distribution of funding to the suppliers based on the government’s direction. The benefit of this is that once funds are moved to Hellebore, the consulting company can use real commercial practices to on-board non-traditional firms. And this strategy also avoids using OTAs which may increase oversight. But I’m not so sure if this is even a feasible route. The task orders released to Hellebore would have to be larger and include much more discretion than the subcontracts destined for the performers. Usually, the proposal for the task order needs to specify what will be done by the prime and it’s team. In any case, Hellebore indicated ABMS is interested in their technology, not their tech-ecosystem management skills.
4. Parallel Development. A final strategy I’ll throw out is that this contract to Hellebore is the first of potentially a few similar contracts. Perhaps the Air Force is hedging its bets and commissioning a few firms to test out a platform. In most cases, the contracts will go no where near their ceiling as the wheat is separated from the chaff. But the platform winner may get scaled and reach their ceiling.

Are there other potential models for this potentially $950 million contract? I suppose my guess at this point is that the Air Force is looking at Hellebore something like a prime contractor with an IDIQ that allows for modular contracting to support “discovery.” I think the Air Force will still do a lot or most contracting outside of this vehicle to keep things moving in parallel. But I don’t know if there will be a concerted parallel development strategy.

One other point is that the Air Force agreed with the GAO’s bashing that it needed long-term technical requirements at a detailed level, a lifecycle cost estimate, affordability analysis, and so forth. That means pivoting to a waterfall model, and may support the idea that Hellebore might come up with a complex proposal with a huge team like a regular defense prime… but I don’t think so.

Here’s Marie Mak from the GAO discussing their report on ABMS:

While the Air Force defined some broad sets of requirements such as the importance to interoperate between different systems, provide real time information, it’s not defined or communicated more detailed requirements that would inform the technologies, software, engineering capabilities that are needed.

 

For example, if you were to build a house, you need a blue-print of the most basic things: the number of levels in that house, the number of rooms, raw size. In comparison, the Air Force is relying on industry to bring them these mature technologies as solutions for ABMS. But industry needs that blue-print.

ABMS and other complex systems developments are clearly not like building a house. For one, all the information necessary to build a house can easily reside in one person’s head and can be accomplished with relatively low-skilled repetitive labor. That is simply not true of something like ABMS and cutting-edge technologies, which requires experimentation and delegation to knowledge workers. For another, it’s not like electrical and drywall technologies are passing by you as you build the house. For ABMS, computing technologies are moving very fast indeed, which could and should change your plans.

I would argue that the desire to have a complete blue-print of advanced systems before you start is the exact reason we so often have high cost growth plus degraded performance to expectations.

The name of the game seems to be: create documentation and artifacts that make it appear like traditional waterfall practices are being followed, but actually take an incremental/modular approach. After all, most large programs fail to stick to their baselines. But once they get momentum, they are nearly impossible to kill. How a $950 million contract to a brand new company fits into all this is beyond me.