Event: Funding flexibility & bridging the valley of death
If a company brings a new technology or solution to the Department of Defense, officials have few sources of funding that allow them to capitalize […]
Mason GovCon
DoD’s hands are being tied when it comes to money
Every year, DoD is losing flexibility to put money where it matters most. DoD submits a budget with more than 1,800 program elements (PEs) for […]
Bridging the “Valley of Death” in DoD does not require new laws!
Execution flexibility is DoD jargon for delegated authority to move money. It is the most direct way to increase decision speed. Since 1960, execution flexibility […]
What could be the impact of reducing industry’s progress payment rates?
Circling back to Director of Defense Pricing and Contracting John Tenaglia’s talk at the Pricing Summit, he mentioned one of the big questions he often […]
Visualizing the intellectual property strategy for a lifecycle sustainment plan
Here is the excellent Christopher Monsey in the Exceptional Release, Intellectual Property (IP) Strategies in Major System Acquisitions: What are We Missing? He asks the […]
Reducing uncertainty and discretion in development contracts
The market for defense R&D is imperfect and fails to provide a reliable mechanism by which the government can automatically secure performance at or near […]
Other Transactions continued growing in FY21, but will it soon level off?
Contracts using other transaction authority saw another year of growth in the Department of Defense, but only when excluding awards for COVID-19. Obligations unrelated to […]
Podcast: Opening programs to modularity and iteration
In this special episode of the Acquisition Talk podcast, we listen into an event that explores how defense programs can harness modern development practices. Center […]
Mason GovCon releases Acquisition Next: A playbook to break the industrial age paradigm
I’ve talked a lot about PPBE Reform on this blog, and while that is an important effort, there’s a lot that the workforce can do […]
GMU Playbook: Make market research a core and continuous organizational capability
In this week’s blog post on our acquisition playbook study, we discuss a recommendation to make market research a core and continuous organizational capability. No […]
Podcast: What’s the price of an AI/ML product?
As firms are finding out, the unit economics of AI/ML is not exactly like software. It requires more manual manipulation of data than one might […]
PPBE reform event: an imperative for winning the great power competition
… in my mind, I equate planning and budgeting and consider the terms almost synonymous, the budget being simply a quantitative expression of operating plans. […]
Defense industrial strategy for the Biden administration
The fundamental challenge I see for the Biden administration is balancing reshoring versus Buy America. The Buy America approach is problematic when it comes to […]
George Mason kicks off an acquisition playbook for the information age
For the past 50 years, there has been a stable consensus about the benefits of competition in the Department of Defense. Unfortunately, infrequent “winner-take-all” programs, […]
Can the military’s operating system for war succeed at scale?
Anduril is best known for supplying surveillance towers and software used to watch over the US-Mexico border and some US bases. Now, it is retooling the software […]