The extreme pain of DoD reprogramming
The length of time between the start of budget planning and execution strains any organization’s predictive capabilities. The process effectively asks the individuals and organization […]
PPBE
Podcast: Defense Budget Reform with Katharina McFarland, Bill Greenwalt, and Bob Daigle
I was please to host a webinar event with George Mason’s Center for Government Contracting featuring three former Pentagon executives. We discussed my white paper […]
Gov’t funding is short-term, project-based, risk-averse, and prone to groupthink
One hypothesis I’d like to investigate is that we’ve gotten a little too centralized and monolithic in our funding. That is something to address. The […]
Agile development isn’t new to defense, it was just cast out by the “whiz kids”
It seems clear that the reciprocity of innovation and requirement is unusually important during the period when demonstrations of feasibility are being attempted. The character […]
The myth of program funding stability
So why is this so hard? For years, the acquisition community has been saying program and funding stability are essential to acquisition reform. To that […]
Startups won’t scale in defense without budget flexibility
These challenges can be met. But the concept still requires a major feat. Congress must amend the budget process so that relatively big dollars can […]
General Hyten gives a metric for measuring acquisition success
There’s actually a pretty easy metric if you want to evaluate whether you’ve been successful for not. All you have to do is go out […]
The most important unresolved aspect of acquisition reform
New guidance for middle tier acquisitions at the Department of Defense looks to clarify the authorities that procurement professionals can use. However, experts like Eric […]
Space Force may have significant autonomy, except in the budget process
The program acquisition strategies developed under a dedicated Space Force SAE [service acquisition executive] will then get fed into the planning, programming, budgeting and execution […]
Podcast: Andrew Hunter on software-defined, hardware-based adaptable systems
Andrew Hunter, director of the defense-industrial group at CSIS, joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss a set of papers on adaptable systems, […]
Is the funding process the last unresolved piece of acquisition reform?
Bernie Skoch: As anyone whose spent time in the five sided house of pleasure can tell you, there’s a programming process and there’s a budgeting […]
DIB recommends new appropriation to meet software challenges
The following is a lengthy excerpt from the Defense Innovation Board’s Software Acquisition and Practices (SWAP) appropriations subgroup. I think it is an excellent expression […]