How can DOD and commercial companies work together in the most efficient way possible? Discovering the answer is the yearlong quest of a study launched in January by the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University.
The goal of the study is to develop a best-practices acquisition playbook for the Information Age that program managers can consult and tailor to work with industry partners. Researchers will conduct interviews with government and industry professionals to discover what actually works—and doesn’t work—in the acquisition process.
“Our objective is to have this be very practically focused for program managers all around the Army acquisition community as well as the other services,” said Dr. Jerry McGinn, executive director of the Center for Government Contracting, within GMU’s School of Business. “That’s where the rubber meets the road, and that’s where the culture gets changed.”
That was from the Army AL&T article, A Deeper Dive. If you have seen successful acquisition practices that you think should be socialized across the department, please reach out to me, we’d love to get your feedback! We also plan to do a series of case study vignettes, so pointers to innovative programs and people is appreciated.
Our framework is that the gradual shift from Industrial Age to Digital Age processes also impacts acquisition practices. But of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to acquisition. The hull of a manned ship perhaps works best using industrial era practices like fixed requirements, total responsibility contracts, cost-based pricing, and so forth. Software- or data-intensive systems, however, might rely on iterative requirements, modular contracts, and pricing based on available alternatives.
Of course, most people may have easily thought that space launch systems would have been an “industrial” era hardware item best suited to legacy practices. SpaceX proved that was not the case, and I wonder how many other military hardware platforms could follow that pattern…
At the core of digital acquisition practices seems to be this return to government “owning the technical baseline.” We hear this again and again from our interviews. Yet there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on what that phrase means. In some cases, people think it means government is the lead systems integrator. Others think it means greater participation in enforcing a modular open systems architecture. Others have different views.
SpaceX again provides a counter point. For a ship system, government may own the technical baseline by contracting out the hull to a shipyard, but GFEing embedded mission systems (organic or contracted) to other firms according to an architecture. But the SpaceX model has the prime contractor perform most hardware and software activities in-house, with production concurrent with development, and they deliver the final product as a service to the military.
Still, SpaceX did not follow the waterfall planning imposed on contractors by DoD, was developed with significant private funding, and has clear dual-use capabilities. Perhaps owning the technical baseline there means the ability to recognize the value of new processes and encourage them (like NASA) rather than stifle or delay it (like the Air Force). So there are no easy answers here…
This is an incredible initiative. Often easy to throw out large complex terms like “Own the Technical Stack” but understanding the details of what that means, the constraints programs may have and the implications requires a lot more insight. This is a great step towards characterizing that better!