Accelerate Program Execution
Over the life of a program, a considerable amount of time is spent developing strategies, coordinating them within the Program Management Office (PMO) and the many external stakeholder and oversight organizations. PMOs will spend months and years developing thousands of pages of documentation and hundreds of Power Point slides and spend countless hours in meetings. How much of that contributes to delivering the capabilities? While there needs to be sufficient rigor to ensure the program is addressing the fundamentals and complying with required elements, months and sometimes years are lost in seeking consensus from dozens of organizations to ensure the documentation and presentations are “perfect” or low enough risk to proceed. Many executives encourage tailoring processes and documents to what makes sense for the program, and while there are some cultural barriers, programs should leverage this empowerment to streamline smartly to deliver capabilities sooner.
Guiding Principles
- Leverage the full suite of acquisition strategies enabled by statutory and regulatory policies to deliver better, faster
- Tailoring acquisition pathways and documentation is the responsibility of all PMO functional team members
- Regulatory policy is waiverable at the right level, do not discount tailoring documentation without critical consideration first
- Adopt the Agile practices of small, dynamic, empowered, teams actively collaborating with stakeholders and end users
- Set up the team for success by establishing a culture of trust, open communication, and partnership, including the user and contractor
- Improve chances of program success by failing fast, continual learning through experimentation, customer feedback, iterative design
Intended To Be Blended
What does the AAF have in common with smoothies? They both involve blending! Read more in this post.
Sparks of Innovation
For rapid innovation to spread successfully, we have to lay a smart foundation.
Adopt Agile Practices
Congress and DoD executives are driving adoption of Agile development practices in acquisition.
Lean on Me
Lean favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development.
Do Just Enough Documentation
Program offices should approach documentation with a mindset of writing “as little as possible / as much as necessary.”
Minimize Document Coordination
Coordinating documentation with many organizations adds considerable time to address critical changes, conflicting direction, and ensuring compliance with policies and laws.
Form Small High Performing Teams
Assembling a team of high-performers fosters an environment where they feed off each others’ passion and expertise.
Tailor Acquisition Pathways
Enable programs to navigate the complex acquisition environment faster by clearly identifying the specific processes, documents, and reviews relevant for that type of acquisition.
Think Portfolios, Not Programs
Federal agencies can accelerate delivery of innovative solutions by designing acquisition portfolios that deliver an integrated suite of capabilities.
“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”
REFERENCES
- Collaborative Organizations, Systems Academy
- The Goal of Defense Acquisition, Dan Ward, Nov 2011
- Your TV Just Died, Dan Ward, Sep 2010
- Call Me Sisyphus, Dan Ward, Jan 2009
- My Big Slow Fail, Dan Ward, Jan 2011