Goals: Best practices for acquisition, what makes it hard, what tools we can create to support it
Good empirical research: tri-assessment, incentive structure to cause people to act this way
How do mismatches happen?
Have someone like SEI do the government side
ACQ has one section dealing with acquisition that needs to be broken up more
CMMI is a set of success factors, not a set of best practices
Study with reference to formulation and its effects on contracts
Have incentive fees for getting it done on time, getting it cheaply, risk management
Award fees set up for schedule only
Correlation of effectiveness of award fees: for example, does 20% really need to go to small business?
Current goals are to provide work, advance technology, get re-elected, make a career move, avoid
protests, prevent graft and it’s not about acquisition
Lots of material out there we can use to pull a picture, like what TAI did
Half of the problems are under the program manager’s control, other half above their pay grade
Quantify turnover
What decision was made for local optimization instead of long-term optimization?
Do acquisition in smaller increments? Have every program manager deliver something by a certain date
Compare Congress to a board of directors in how business is run
Congressional impact significant, but not much we can do about it, Congress can’t fight agile
Have one company – nationalize company?
Root-cause studies
Look at acquisition risks – do a risk model of what we learn.
Use fault tree analysis of a program and know the probability of success of the program at a given point
Tool that help you quantify s/w (or system) opportunities
impact of putting in a wedge in a funding cycle
Source-selection criteria
Do a prototype
Do a bid at each milestone?
Feasibility rationale / risk assessment
Make acquisition like a series of tasks that are competed and at each milestone, demonstrate what you did
Can’t plan a huge, complex system upfront, but can evolve into one
Incremental acquisition
Just tell people to improve capability and people will self-organize, no hard goal at the end – Annual
Commitment Model
Is amount of code a part of complexity?
What are other acquisition models that would succeed, that use the idea of incremental commitment?
Perhaps government-funded competitions
How often do our re-use based assumptions work out?
Better ways to identify risks and feasibility
Do something like “100 Questions for Technical Review”
Focus on known acquisition risks
All different win conditions for acquisition: socio-economic, military
What are successful acquisition projects?
Successful ones are follow-ons to legacy systems.
Reasons for success: Lots of money, independent review, knowledge up-front
What are the criteria to be success, what defines success…can miss technical win, but win on political
What part of the acquisition process can we impact?
The whole-should costs model

Ray did a demo of “Macro Risk Model” :
o Rich Turner and DeWitt Latimer to use Ray’s tool
o Can be used by contractors
o Add in columns describing probability, evidence
o Use “assessment” instead of “survey” in the name
o Metadata in start of survey, like time completed
o Default to unavailable
o Color code the dots
o use scampi
o do a Delphi with people who use the tool
o tool reconciles people’s different perceptions
o publish the questionnaire, like in CrossTalk, co-author with Kristen Baldwin
o web-based instead of Excel
o correlate with Defense Acquisition Guidebook
Contracting mismatches
Don’t want a contract that incentives the wrong things
Don’t prevent you from doing the right things
Contract change should not shut down the project
Enables periodic/flexible technical negotiations with engineers, does not allow only once at beginning
Appropriately have meaningful payment milestones
Reward contractors appropriately for best effort
Allow the business of the contract to continue w/o meeting milestones
Contracts that value demonstratable results as opposed to deliverable documentation
Contracts allow trade for schedule, cost, performance (value-engineering clauses)
Reasonable visibility including subs
Accountability
Incremental contracts need to consider total lifecycle costs
Burn all 1521
Develop a replacement for 1521
Contracting and COTS
COTS refresh
Escrow in case company goes out of business
Doesn’t over-constrains the supplier
Mandating a product development method
Can a contract be a hindrance to customer contact?
Contract should specify how a CRACK customer should work with you
Write a standard around the Incremental Commitment Model
Good things to do:
Top 10 acquisition risk list
Acquirer POV
KTR POV
Research the Certificate Software Development Professional: rewrite the test and effectiveness/impact of
certifications
Find and compare contractor and acquirer the actual best practices during the acquisition projects, coming
from the supplier point of view
Map the risks to the practices to determine coverage and gaps
Research Projects:
Value: 1(least) – 10(most)
Difficulty: 1(least) – 10 (most)
A. Taxonomy of software project contract efforts
B. Study of successful contracts to find commonalities in software projects
a. Expect follow-on projects to do better, but need analytical evidence
b. What are the criteria to be success
C. Top acquisition risk list (acquirer/contractor point of views)
D. Inventory current acquisition practices on acquirer and contractor sides
E. Map risks to practices to determine coverage and gaps in practice
F. Quantify the impact/cost of the turn-over of acquisition personnel
G. Look at acquisition risks – do a risk model of what we learn.
H. Develop fault tree analysis of to know the probability of success of the program at a given point
I. Tool that help you quantify s/w (or system) opportunities and risks over time and impact of
missing these
J. Do something like “100 Questions for Technical Review” for software intensive systems
acquisition
K. How often do our acquisition re-use based assumptions work out?
L. Is amount of code a part of complexity for acquisition?
M. Macro risk project tool – evolve and pilot
N. How would an acquisition organization write an acquisition strategy for a development based on
MBASE and incremental commitment
Transition Projects:
MBASE to a standard format (for injection into standards bodies)
Write a standard around the Incremental Commitment Model