How to cross the bridge to nowhere…creating the missing pieces.
Concepts, roadmaps, and pipelines a plenty have been thought up to solve the innovation-to-acquisition problem. In simplest terms how do you get a product or project from start-to-sustainment? Let’s skip over all the wishful thinking about what might happen in a future DoD Acquisition reform, and instead help create capabilities today in the system we have.
Superheroes don’t exist, and neither do all knowing experts at all levels of government. There are plenty of well-meaning and talented folks who have little to no clue about anything outside of their direct function within the acquisition system because simply…that’s not their job. Don’t expect the Requirements person in A5 to wax philosophic on the art of contracting, any more than you should expect the contracting squadron personnel to provide you an in depth analysis of the 1067 process. There are a small number of folks who have at least a baseline understanding of the regular process of start-to-sustainment in military acquisition, and an almost nonexistent amount who have expertise in many of the areas.
You need to form a team and develop a plan as early as possible on how to get to sustainment. First assume success and start planning for it now. R&D is for trying, Acquisition is for buying. When making a plan for acquisition, you are starting a separate process from development, beginning from an assumption that the widget meets a Requirement. Understanding the difference between those phases is important, and running or at least planning for them in parallel is important to save time.
Second find & train a govt champion. There are endless meetings contractors will not be allowed in, nor contacts they can initially make. This has to be done by a gov’t person, and the higher ranking the better. But please don’t assume this person is an acquisition expert, the odds of that are usually very low, because the folks who care enough and have enough time to champion individual products/projects are almost never acquisition folks. Training this champion on who to talk to and what to ask for at each step of the process is CRITICAL as they are the voice of the effort.
Third know the acquisition steps and follow the path. The best thing any acquisition effort can do is backward planning. Start with the end in mind and develop the plan in reverse. Easiest way to do that is start with a conversation with a rep from A5 in a command staff, and pick their brain on the steps to integrate into an existing requirement or start a new requirement. It also helps to have your champion read up on JCIDS and be able to speak that language a little prior to that meeting. From there you can start mapping out where the product might fit in, and what support will be needed and from who and in what order.
