|
|
|
|
![1105 Media [justice]](/images/ds1_pntmlogo.gif "1105 Media [justice]") |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
home > March 24, 2008 issue > article
Leaving room for agility
By Sean Gallagher
This month, we’ve taken an in-depth look at the Joint Tactical Radio
System, and what has been done to change the program during the past
three years to turn it around. Managing constant change in the framework of a ponderous acquisition system, which trips up countless Defense
Department technology projects, is what led JTRS astray in the first place.
At the AFCEA West conference in San Diego last month, Navy Chief
Information Officer Robert Carey led a panel of Navy officials in a discussion of
how to speed the delivery of information technology capabilities to warfighters.
“It dawned on me recently that one of the torpedoes I worked on in the ’90s
had made it through operational evaluation last summer,” Carey said. “We can’t
make weapons systems get there faster.” But, he said, “there is much that could be
done to get IT out to the fleet faster.”
The problem is a lack of agility. “Your decision cycle can turn multiple circles
inside ours,” Vice Adm. Denby Starling, commander of the Naval Network
Warfare Command, said to members of the vendor community there. “We’re talking
about things for [fiscal year] 2010, FY 2014 now. We haven’t designed a [procurement]
system agile enough to deploy a new IT system across the fleet inside a
single budget year.”
Lt. Gen. Charles Croom, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency,
has made changes to the requirements process a part of DISA’s overall agility
efforts. When Croom first came to DISA in 2005, they had “a requirements
process that was 18 to 24 months on average.” The end product was a requirements
document that ran to 500 pages, “that gave us a document that was really
unusable to build anything to begin with anyway,” Croom told me when we sat
down recently at DISA headquarters.
Overspecifying requirements reduces the agility of a project, Croom said. By
reducing the size of the requirements — from 500 pages to 76, as the Joint Forces
Command did with the Network Enabled Command Capability requirements —
the requirements can be focused more on the broader capabilities, he said.
“We’re not tied to technical solutions that are presupposed,” Croom said. “It
allowed us the latitude to adopt the newest technology available.”
JTRS didn’t necessarily have the luxury of using broad requirements, but it did
suffer from too many requirements being piled on it. By managing the scope of
requirements in the first place — and avoiding overspecification of how to meet
them — project managers can build a great deal more agility into technology projects.
And that’s the first step toward speeding the pace of delivering new technology
to warfighters.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
