The Defense Department’s corporate university for acquisition professionals
plans to revamp its training programs to make them more relevant to Pentagon
priorities. Driving these changes is a desire to reshape the weapon-procurement
process, so it can be more responsive to military needs and more attuned to
modern business practices.
Frank J. Anderson Jr., president of the Defense Acquisition University, said
he wants to bring “speed and agility” into acquisition training
programs. DAU, with headquarters in Fort Belvoir, Va., trains about 135,000
acquisition professionals. Approximately 85 percent of the students are civilians.
The university has a budget of about $100 million.
Anderson came to DAU last October, after a 34-year career in the U.S. Air Force.
During his first few weeks on the job, he realized that DAU would need to adapt
to the evolving needs of a Defense Department that was gearing up to fight an
extended war and take on new missions in homeland security.
“The Defense Department leadership and the services decided that we really
need to make some substantive changes in the way we train our people,”
Anderson said in a recent interview. So far, he said, “the biggest thing
we’ve done is change the philosophy of how we will train our acquisition
workforce.” The new philosophy is based on “speed and agility in
training,” he explained.
Undersecretary of Defense Edward C. ‘Pete’ Aldridge has been outspoken
about the need to make defense acquisition programs more efficient. His predecessors
during the Clinton administration, Paul Kaminski and Jacques Gansler, implemented
a host of regulatory changes and “acquisition streamlining” initiatives
that simplified the process. But there are still complaints within the Defense
Department and the services that program managers are not doing enough to expedite
the fielding of new technologies and that acquisition officials often don’t
understand the needs of the war-fighting force.
Anderson is quick to point out that there are “great people in the acquisition
business,” but in many cases, “the challenge they have is the process.”
Under Aldridge, the Pentagon has placed more emphasis on “outcome and
results” in acquisition programs. That means a program team is expected
to make a commitment to meet cost, schedule and technology goals, said Anderson.
“So when we budget for a program … we meet those objectives.”
The upshot for DAU, he added, is that “we must reengineer training so
we provide our people with the knowledge and skills to do a better job.”
An awful lot of the slowness and the awkwardness of the acquisition system
stemmed from “policies and procedures” that kept getting added to
the process every time there was a mistake, Anderson noted. Defense leaders
today are seeking to remove some of the bureaucratic obstacles that unnecessarily
slow down programs, he said. “Let’s create streamlined processes
that will allow people to be more responsive to customer needs.”
During a congressional hearing earlier this month, Aldridge said that the government
“must retain the capability to be ‘smart buyers’ of defense
equipment.” This relates directly to the quality of the acquisition workforce,
he said. “The Defense Acquisition University is increasing its workload
and coverage by moving from purely classroom training to more web-based learning
modules, by emphasizing critical thinking skills and case-based reasoning.”
To help prepare acquisition professionals to manage programs using “critical
thinking” and to solve complex problems, DAU recently introduced a 10-week
executive development course built after the Harvard Executive Development Program.
“We worked the program in conjunction with representatives from the Harvard
Business School,” Anderson said.
The training focuses on practical problem solving and leadership skills, he
added. The 10-week program will cover approximately 100 cases. At least 80 percent
of those cases will be based on real-world acquisition programs and the students
will be required to actually execute a program. The course will be offered on-line
by 2003.
“A lot of training in the past was focused on regulations, processes
and procedures,” instead of problem-solving, Anderson said. “We
can’t prepare people for every specific issue they will face in a program,
but we can prepare them so they’ll have the critical-thinking skills,
so they’ll know how to shape smart business deals, do a better job of
teaming and partnering.”
DAU students also will learn a whole lot about spiral development and evolutionary
acquisition, the big buzzwords in the business today.
Spiral development and evolutionary acquisition are terms that have been used
interchangeably, Anderson said. However, he noted that these are “relatively
new concepts within the Department, and it takes time for everybody to adopt
consistent terminology.”
He makes a distinction between evolutionary acquisition as a strategy, and
spiral development as a methodology. “In practice, a program that adopts
an evolutionary acquisition strategy can utilize a number of methodologies (such
as spiral) to develop the components of a system,” he explained. An evolutionary
acquisition “rapidly delivers an operationally effective, suitable and
sustainable subset of the overall required capability,” he said. “Subsequent
incremental deliveries add to this basic capability until the objective capability
is achieved.”
Spiral uses “design-prototype-evaluate” cycles, which serve to
refine requirements by letting users experience the product through the prototype,
immediately feeding their judgments back into the design of the next cycle,
he said. “Spiral development reduces technical risk by allowing implementers
to drive the ‘bugs’ out of new technologies through iterative prototypes.”
Key to the success of evolutionary acquisition, Anderson said, is “continuous
user involvement in the articulation, validation and prioritization of system
requirements over the life of the program.”
An evolutionary acquisition program is “driven by the user’s vision
of operational capability, instead of being locked in to a specific weapon system
based on static requirements that may no longer make sense.” It requires
a commitment, Anderson said, “to make the tough trades to get the right
capability to the war-fighter at the right time, within the constraints of a
budget. … Evolutionary acquisition is perhaps the only way we can efficiently
satisfy the war-fighters’ evolving needs with modern technology.”
Two examples of programs employing this approach are the Air Force Small Diameter
Bomb and the joint-service Global Command and Control System.