STUDENT1:William
Good Day,
This week takes me back to the early 2000’s when I attended a course on
the Marine Corps Planning Process (MCPP). The Defense Systems
Acquisition Process, MCPP and many other DoD processes have inputs and
outputs (outcomes) for each phase of the process. I also think about
when the DoD for service requirements went from a Statement of Work
(telling the contractor how to do the work) to a Performance Work
Statement (describing the work to be done by the contractor in terms of
measurable outcomes with a quality assurance surveillance plan).
The DoD has struggled to manage its acquisitions in the most cost
efficient and effective manner. They have developed with the assistance
from outside agencies evolutionary, knowledge-based concepts that have
shown to produce more effective and efficient acquisition outcomes. The
problem is that several DoD programs currently do not employ all these
practices, and the results are cost increases, schedule overruns, and
poor product quality and reliability. There is also at times influence
from outside agencies (i.e. Congress, stakeholders) to make changes to
the DoD’s total portfolio of major defense acquisition which effects
program outcomes. GAO has done many studies on program outcomes and
provided recommendations for DoD to improve their acquisition process.
For instance, GAO reviewed the commercial market best practices and
identified key areas to the success of product development programs and
focused on how DoD can better leverage its investments by shortening the
time it takes to field new capabilities at a more predictable cost,
schedule and performance outcome. GAO has also developed a set of
knowledge metrics to determine whether programs have attained the right
knowledge at critical points over the course of a system acquisition and
facilitate the identification of potential problems that could lead to
cost, schedule, or performance shortfalls. One critical point of note is
for the acquisition process to achieve a high level of technology
maturity at the start of program development. Establishing program
outcome metrics allows for DoD’s program managers to have a baseline to
perform an assessment of the root causes of changes and implement a
corrective action strategy to ensure that the warfighter, Congress and
taxpayers are getting a return on their investment
STUDENT2: Michael
Good evening class. I really like this weeks
discussion topic, as I feel that it is vastly overlooked, at least in my
experience as a contract specialist. I have had issues with the agency
that I have been recently assigned to support, where I have found
multiple cases of unauthorized commitments. The acquisition shop I came
to churns out tons of service contracts, with a fair bulk of them being
for small efforts of instructors coming to teach classes. The typical
contracts are for a set number of lessons. The issue was they were not
monitoring the progress of the programs, and instructors kept getting
sent, even past the point of them completing the contracted amount of
sessions. I think this is fair example of how not having a way to
measure a programs progress can be detrimental.
Metrics are not going to always be clear cut, nor will the always be
the same. When you are determining the requirements of the federal
agency, it is imparitive that the needs are clear. I believe that this
greatly assists in being able to determine what constitutes the clearest
representation of progress/success. Sometimes it might be as easy as
counting numbers of deliverables, but in service contracts, it is a lot
more vague. If a contractor is being hired to conduct construction for a
new office building, there is no one numeric value that shows progress,
so you need to know how to identify objective characteristics that show
you how far along the program is.
0 comments