Results of this research suggest that the defense acquisition system should break the concept of the PM’s triple constraint of cost, schedule, and performance. The triple constraint ties the hands of the PMs and may contribute to high program failure and no delivered capability.
The bottom line is that if all three—cost, schedule, and performance—are set, then the program may have an unnecessarily high risk of failure. If affordability sets the constraints of cost and schedule, which must be done in a government/defense industry domain like defense acquisition, then flexibility in determining which requirements to pursue by allowing ID approaches would loosen the triple constraint stranglehold. In the end, the warfighter must determine whether the first capability increment offers enough capability improvement over the current systems to warrant the investment of time and money.
The current defense acquisition system incentivizes PMs to get through an improved milestone—often with a program that cannot be executed in terms of cost, schedule, and performance and has a high risk of cancellation and failure. A better approach would incentivize fielded and delivered warfighter capability by allowing PMs to develop acquisition strategies that balance gaining program approval and maintaining acquisition baselines.
Can I get a hallelujah? That was the excellent Robert Mortlock writing in the ARJ, Studying Acquisition Strategy Formulation of Incremental Development Approaches.
There is supposed to be the “iron triangle” of cost-schedule-technical. But in the implementation two realities emerge: (1) a waterfall approach that fixes a technical baseline and then estimates the cost and schedule of achievement, where it is cost and schedule that increase when difficulties appear; or (2) an agile approach that takes a fixed cost-schedule baseline and then puts out capability in an iterative way, and when difficulties appear the result is lower capability.
There are many reasons to prefer fixed cost-schedule targets and allowing flexibility in the technical achievement. The most important reason, perhaps, it the asymmetry of projects. Cost, schedule, and technical outcomes are bounded at zero, so your risk of getting negative capabilities is slight or impossible. But they are all unbounded in the positive direction.
If you fix technical capabilities and do what it takes in cost and schedule to get there (current DoD paradigm), then you can go bankrupt before receiving any capability. That’s the worst possible outcome, sinking more and more money into something that fails. And that’s exactly what the DoD does today. There’s very little upside to the approach — you’ll never get a capability for zero dollars, or negative dollars!
If you fix cost and schedule, then the worst that can happen is getting nothing for it (and that shouldn’t happen often, since it should be canceled early if no progress is being made). Loss of a fixed investment isn’t a systemic threat. But the best thing that can happen is a revolution in military technology, which can dramatically improve national security. So there’s *huge* upside to this strategy, and rather little downside.
As Nassim Taleb would say, an antifragile project strategy would be to provide fixed investments of money and time, understanding some will return nothing but the ones who do really well will revolutionize the world.
It’s a great point, Eric, but what you (and Robert Mortlock) are really saying is that we need to scrap the counterproductive concepts of “mission needs” and “thresholds”. If performance below the threshold level really has no military value, then it makes sense to fix the technical baseline at the threshold. But everyone knows that thresholds are not defined that way — they are defined as “the minimum amount of capability improvement I need to promise in order to get this program funded”. Updated daily.
We would manage our money very differently if we stopped thinking of programs as having a beginning and an end, and producing and fielding one kind of thing. We never do that, but we continue to try to manage the money as if we did. We buy new fighter aircraft as if we were buying cars, planning to drive the same model for some number of years and then replace it with a new one, occasionally rotating the tires and getting a tune-up.
All very excellent points. Another part of that mission needs concept is that it doesn’t update well with the waterfall development cycles. For example, by the time the F-22 got to IOC, the Russians went through 6 generations of SAMs.