Army Changing How It Does Requirements: McMaster by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
From the post:
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So there’s a difficult balance to strike between the three words that make up “mobile protected firepower.” The vehicle is still just a concept, not a funded program. But past projects like FCS began going wrong right from those first conceptual stages, when TRADOC Systems Managers (TSMs) wrote up the official requirements for performance with little reference to what tradeoffs would be required in terms of real-world engineering. So what is TRADOC doing differently this time?“We just did an Initial Capability Document [ICD] for ‘mobile protected firepower,’” said McMaster. “When we wrote that document, we brought together 18th Airborne Corps and other [infantry] and Stryker brigade combat team leadership” — i.e. the units that would actually use the vehicle — “who had recent operational experience.”
So they’re getting help — lots and lots of help. In an organization as bureaucratic and tribal as the Army, voluntarily sharing power is a major breakthrough. It’s especially big for TRADOC, which tends to take on priestly airs as guardian of the service’s sacred doctrinal texts. What TRADOC has done is a bit like the Vatican asking the Bishop of Boise to help draft a papal bull.
But that’s hardly all. “We brought together, obviously, the acquisition community, so PEO Ground Combat Vehicle was in on the writing of the requirements. We brought in the Army lab, TARDEC,” McMaster told reporters at a Defense Writers’ Group breakfast this morning. “We brought in Army Materiel Command and the sustainment community to help write it. And then we brought in the Army G-3 [operations and plans] and the Army G-8 [resources]” from the service’s Pentagon staff.
Traditionally, all these organizations play separate and unequal roles in the process. This time, said McMaster, “we wrote the document together.” That’s the model for how TRADOC will write requirements in the future, he went on: “Do it together and collaborate from the beginning.”
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It’s important to remember how huge a hole the Army has to climb out of. The 2011 Decker-Wagner report calculated that, since 1996, the Army had wasted from $1 billion to $3 billion annually on two dozen different cancelled programs. The report pointed out an institutional problem much bigger than just the Future Combat System. Indeed, since FCS went down in flames, the Army has cancelled yet another major program, its Ground Combat Vehicle.
As I ask in the headline: How Are Your Big Data Requirements Coming?
Have you gotten all the relevant parties together? Have they all collaborated on making the business case for your use of big data? Or are your requirements written by managers who are divorced from the people to use the resulting application or data? (Think Virtual Case File.)
The Army appears to have gotten the message on requirements, temporarily at least. How about you?