CTMA Project Announcement: Rapid Development and Acquisition Initiative

The DoD is hampered by current policies, processes, and regulations, which govern development and acquisition to support maintenance and sustainment of the warfighter. Today, DoD’s focus is on executing independent programs that don’t take commercial best practices into consideration. These same policies, processes, and regulations limit industry’s ability to enter the defense industry market and implement industry acquisition best practices to DoD.

In contrast, commercial businesses manage integrated product lines across multiple products and services. The DoD can leverage this model as a basis for acquisition and sustainment strategies to overcome policies, processes, and regulations that negatively impact the ability to meet mission demand. The DoD can foster dynamic and innovative solutions for tomorrow’s warfighter by designing acquisition and sustainment portfolios that deliver an integrated suite of capabilities.

This initiative is designed to identify an alternative strategy, processes, and recommend policy changes that would align DoD processes more closely to industry best practices and enable the government to take advantage of efficiencies already proven by industry. The objective is to compare current DoD requiring, acquiring, and sustaining business processes and rules against best commercial business practices where integrated product line engineering and agile methods are applied.

The collaborative partners on this CTMA initiative shall focus on the requirements within current DoD development and acquisition processes to respond to the maintenance and sustainment requirements to support the warfighter. Tasks will be:

  • Conduct a comparative assessment of JCIDS and Service specific process, practices, and business rules (Policy, Directives, Mandates, & Memos) against industry best-practices.
  • Prepare a report outlining gaps and friction-points in process, practice, and business rules to include recommendations for resolution.
  • Assess the monetary and non-monetary benefits for implementation of the recommendations.
  • Demonstrate best-practice engineering process activities based on overall project conclusions.
  • Demonstrate a product solution designed and developed while implementing the proposed processes and recommendations of the comparative assessment and proposed strategy.
  • Demonstrate the implementation of parallel/semi-parallel processes for requirements and prototype development of the solution.

Through an application of industry best practices across the DoD development and acquisition process identified through this initiative, public and private industry is expected to benefit by having a less restrictive means for entering the defense industry market. Industry will have a new market for offering development best practices and improvements for legacy products. Additionally, industry will better understand the approach and requirements format for development and delivery of capabilities to DoD activities, and associated DoD industry partners.

As a by-product of this initiative, several specific benefits applicable to the entire DoD will be identified and quantified. When widely adopted, DoD stands to benefit from clear requirements development and acquisition practices through a reduced supply and maintenance burden that improves equipment availability. This will ultimately translate into supply, maintenance management and maintenance touch labor reductions. This will not only ease the burden of impending reductions in USMC/DoD end strength, but also reduce the required number of spares and consumable parts needed – and all of the deployment and distribution required to supply these items to deployed units which operate the equipment more heavily than in garrison training.