Reworking Defense Acquisition
Short strategies, less mass, rapid prototyping, and effective execution are they keys to success.
Rework by Jason Fried and David Hansson, is a classic business book that challenges conventional wisdom and offers a fresh perspective on productivity and impact. Unlike traditional bureaucratic approaches, Rework provides a practical playbook for achieving more with less. In this post, we'll explore key excerpts from the book and demonstrate how these lessons can be applied within the DoD to drive efficiency and innovation.
Strategies
“If you write a big plan, you’ll most likely never look at it.”
“Plans longer than a few pages end up as fossils in a file cabinet.
Working without a plan may seem scary, but blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.
What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.
Unlearn misguided writing lessons you learn in academia: The longer a document is, the more it matters; Stiff formal tone is better than being conversational; Using big words is impressive; You need to write a certain number of words or pages to make a point; The format matters as much (or more) than the content of what you write.”
In defense acquisitions, programs are required to develop dozens of extensive strategies that require hundreds and collectively often thousands of pages to describe. Programs must coordinate these strategies with dozens of oversight organizations, each of whom will review to ensure compliance with dozens of policies and statutes…and alignment with their personal preferences. There will often be conflicting directions on key elements of the strategies which will take significant time to adjudicate. If you haven’t had the joy of resolving a Comment Resolution Matrix (CRM) with hundreds of comments then you really haven’t lived.
In many cases a program will develop a strategy to acquire capabilities in a method that runs counter to what some oversight organizations are familiar or comfortable with. Oversight will often drive them to change their strategies to comport with a legacy mindset and approaches. Programs must then decide if they are committed to their strategy to push back, or do they go along with what they believe to be a suboptimal approach simply to get approval through the system.
As it can take 12-18 months or more for major programs to run the gauntlet of reviews and documentation approvals across many levels of oversight, having approved strategy documents is viewed as a major accomplishment. GAO did an informative study a number of years ago where they found that it took on average 5,600 staff days to gain coordination and approval on ~50 specific information requirements - and that half of those were not even considered critical by acquisition officials. While there have been some improvements from those days, many of the same processes still exist and the progress that has been made is under threat of being reversed.
As time progresses and conditions change in operations, threats, technologies, performance, risks, costs, schedules, and more, there is understandable reluctance to update the program strategies given that it drives a new round of coordination and approvals. Programs may either pivot their approach irrespective of what’s in their approved strategies or simply execute according to the original plan, knowing full well the end result will not address the current environment. Many startups live by the phrase “Pivot or Die,” in DoD, its more often “Pivot or Survive.”
This is where shorter documents are preferred over longer ones. They should succinctly cover the key strategy elements to enable a common understanding among key program stakeholders and justify to oversight officials they have a sound approach to proceed. We need to lower the pain of making updates to strategy documents and view them as dynamic documents that are continuously improved to reflect the current environment…leveraging digital tools.
A program manager and key officials armed with a 10-slide deck overview, schedule, and current status of the program is invaluable to engage internally and externally. Others are more likely to read a short 5-10 page document than a 50-100 page one. While a billion dollar program isn’t going to get approved based on a five page strategy, we need to operate under the principle of less is more.
Mass
“Embrace the idea of having less mass.”
Right now you’re the smallest, the leanest, and the fastest you’ll ever be. From here on out, you’ll start accumulating mass. And the more massive an object, the more energy required to changes its direction. It’s as true in the business world as it is in the physical world.
Mass is increased by: Long term contracts, excess staff, permanent decisions, meetings, thick process, inventory (physical or mental), hardware, software, and technology lock-ins, long-term roadmaps, and office politics.
Avoid these things whenever you can. That way, you’ll be able to change direction easily. The more expensive it is to make a change, the less likely you are to make it.
Huge organizations can take years to pivot. They talk instead of act. They meet instead of do.
But if you keep your mass low, you can quickly change anything: your entire business model, product feature set, and/or marketing message. You can make mistakes and fix them quickly. You can change your priorities, product mix, or focus. And most important, you can change your mind.
The Air Force Rapid Capability Office is a great example of an organization that achieves great success with limited mass. They’re able to tap and attract top talent from across the Air Force (and DoD) to work in small high performing teams. Instead of having program offices with hundreds of people, they operate with small core teams, then partner with others to scale. Their work includes the X-37B or “unmanned space shuttle”, and the B-21 bomber. Despite these being large and very important programs, they have a small approval chain of three executives and are able to shield themselves from the larger bureaucracy due to their classified work.
SOCOM Acquisition is another example of a high speed, high performance organization. They use small teams to engage closely with operators to understand their environment, demonstrate interim solutions, and pivot as conditions warrant. SOCOM acquires smaller systems than the billion dollar aircraft and ship weapon systems, but embodies a culture of speed, agility, and maximizing mission impact.
While every organization can’t be fully staffed with Top 10% performers, the lesson is to build an organization around a few top performers instead of many average Joes or low-performing Larrys. (No offense to anyone named Joe or Larry). A small team has less mass, which means they can run faster and pivot easier.
Prototype
“The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you would want to use. That lets you design what you know – and you’ll figure out immediately whether or not what you’re making is any good.”
“When we start designing something, we sketch out ideas with a big, thick Sharpie marker instead of a ballpoint pen. Why? Pen points are too fine. They’re too high-resolution. They encourage you to worry about things that you shouldn’t worry about yet, like perfecting the shading or whether to use a dotted or dashed line. You end up focusing on things that should still be out of focus. A Sharpie makes it impossible to drill down that deep. You can only draw shapes, lines, and boxes. That’s good. The big picture is all you should be worrying about in the beginning.”
Prototyping and experimentation are invaluable elements of defense acquisition. Exploring working systems with operators, testers, and other stakeholders is vastly more beneficial than producing lengthy documents and briefings that speculate or hypothesize what could be possible. There are acquisition policies in-place that support giving vendors freedom to explore novel designs and solutions to address user needs. Rapid prototyping was the major element of the Middle Tier of Acquisition pathway to more easily allow experimentation and test in operational environments. The same approach was envisioned for the Software Acquisition Pathway, where Minimum Viable Products were encouraged to get users on the system and more quickly identifying their greatest pain points. These approaches provide invaluable performance insights, highlight critical user perceptions, and identify opportunities.
Beyond developing and producing a new system, equally important is how operators can rapidly pivot their tactics and techniques to employ these new solutions. We can’t wait years to build a schoolhouse and endless documentation for employing each new system. We must shape a more dynamic environment where developers and operators closely iterate on solutions, develop new (and imperfect) concepts of operation, then produce and deploy at scale when ready.
We must not burden programs using these rapid pathways with the documentation, reviews, and oversight designed for major weapon systems. We must enable and embrace lean operations with a focus on prototyping that can rapidly iterate on solutions and get them fielded.
Execute
“Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The real question is how well you execute.”
“I don’t have enough time/money/people/experience.” Stop whining. Less is a good thing. Constraints are advantages in disguise. Limited resources force you to make do with what you’ve got. There’s no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative.
Sacrifice some of your darlings for the greater good. Cut your ambition in half. You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-ass whole.
When things aren’t working, the natural inclination is to throw more at the problem. More people, time, and money. All that ends up doing is making the problem bigger. The right way to go is the opposite direction: Cut back. So do less. Your project won’t suffer nearly as much as you fear. In fact, there’s a good chance it’ll end up even bigger. You’ll be forced to make tough calls and sort out what truly matters. If you start pushing back deadlines and increasing your budget, you’ll never stop.
Whenever you can, divide problems into smaller and smaller pieces until you’re able to deal with them completely and quickly. Simply rearranging your tasks this way can have an amazing impact on your productivity and motivation. For example, break that list of a hundred items into ten lists of ten items. That means when you finished an item on a list, you’ve completed 10% of that list, instead of 1%.
Own your bad news. When something goes wrong, someone is going to tell the story. You’ll be better off if it’s you. Otherwise, you create an opportunity for rumors, hearsay, and false information to spread. Don’t think you can just sweep it under the rug. You can’t hide anymore. These days, someone else will call you on it if you don’t do it yourself. People will respect you more if you are open, honest, public, and responsive during a crisis.”
Many acquisition programs overrun costs and schedules. What often happens is we grumble, but then increase funding to the programs and contracts to get it done given the criticality of the program. We need to explore alternate measures where we hold tight on budgets and/or schedules, but descope or pivot in the designs and strategies. Given warfighters are often operating with 30-year old legacy systems, delivering an interim solution sooner will be viewed more favorably than a full solution years later.
Major weapon systems today must do an Analysis of Alternatives in the early phase to explore the best technical and operational approach, then execute on it. If they later face a Nunn-McCurdy breach of 15% or 25% cost / schedule growth, a revisit of all the strategies, resources, and requirements is triggered to ensure it is still valid. However, we should have periodic reviews for all programs to sanity check key elements:
Do the requirements reflect the current operational environment, priorities, and threats? Are Program Managers talking to the operational and intelligence commands?
What is the trade space for the key performance parameters? If the last 10% of a performance measure drives 50% of the budget or years in schedule, can we deliver an interim 90% solution sooner?
Is the engineering and contracting team conducting continuous market research? Is there a commercial or other alternate solution that can address the capability needs better, faster, and/or cheaper?
Does our current acquisition strategy and design reflect the best approach?
Are the vendors properly incentivized to execute on plan or has their corporate prioritization of the program changed?
These can be informal conversations within a program office as well as between a program manager, their PEO, and operational sponsor(s). Programs can enlist teams to do independent program assessments for objective reviews, without bringing in IGs or GAO. If too many issues are identified, then acquisition officials should make hard calls to end them early without falling prey to the sunk cost fallacy.
As Rework highlights, embrace the constraints and get creative to address the critical issues and opportunities to rapidly deliver warfighting capabilities.
“You’re better off with a kick ass half than a half-ass whole.”
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