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home > April 21, 2008 issue > article
The risks of thinking big
By Sean Gallagher
There’s no crime in thinking big. However, as seen in the case of the
Army’s gargantuan Future Combat Systems project, there are practical limits to
how big a project can be — especially when it’s dependent on the delivery of
several other big projects.
FCS is an example of how the Defense Department’s culture of procurement
and development can collapse on itself. It’s understood that FCS requires creating
something new, pushing technology beyond its previous limits; that’s what much of
defense systems development is about. Whether it’s breathing new life into an old
concept, such as the projects covered in our cover story on satellite alternatives
(Page 8) or the remote sensors being used by the Homeland Security Department’s
virtual fence and FCS (Page 24), everything DOD
does with technology pushes it to its limits. Risk is
inherent in pushing limits.
But the traditional approach to developing an allencompassing
set of solutions simultaneously within
one program doesn’t work on the scale of FCS. At its
heart, FCS is a software project — a really big software
project, as David Perera reveals in his story this
month (Page 6). It’s not a syndrome unique to DOD
or even government. In the corporate world, there are
innumerable examples of massive projects reach
exceeded their grasps, either failing utterly or far surpassing
their expected costs.
Even the smallest projects can fail when saddled
with boilerplate procurement practices based more
on tradition than regulation. It doesn’t have to be
this way. As Chris Gunderson, research associate
professor of information science at the Naval
Postgraduate School and principal investigator for
the Netcentric Certification Office and W2COG
Initiatives, said during a panel I moderated at the
recent FOSE conference in April, “There’s nothing in the [Federal Acquisition
Regulation] that says you have to be stupid.”
There’s plenty of room for creativity in how procurement is done, for example, to
expand on approaches such as the ones used in the revamped Joint Tactical Radio
System program we covered in depth last month, or by the Defense Information
Systems Agency under Lt. Gen. Charles Croom’s leadership to reduce requirements in
exchange for faster, cheaper delivery on projects.
But that means being willing to accept the risk of change in addition to the
risks normally attending large projects. It takes courage to step up and accept the
risks of change to increase the chance of completing projects successfully and
quickly.
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