U.S. Army Acquisition -- The Program Office Perspective

Abstract

The U.S. Army Strategic Software Improvement Program (ASSIP) is a multiyear effort to improve the way the Army acquires software-intensive systems. As part of the ASSIP, the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute examined 12 of the Army's Acquisition Category 1 (ACAT 1) programs using a method called Benchmarking for Improvement (BFI). The purpose of the BFI evaluations was to define the current state of acquisition practice across the Army to discover best practices, identify software challenges, and develop potential recommendations for Army-wide improvement. The BFI team also provided each program manager (PM) with an independent view of program-level activities and made specific recommendations for improvement. A briefing provided to each PM documented these recommendations. This report documents the results of interviews conducted during BFI evaluations. Some of the themes that surfaced during the interviews with PMs were as follows: (1) risk management practices are not standardized and risks are inconsistently and insufficiently tracked, updated, and addressed; (2) the acquisition policy changes that occurred during the past 5 years have created confusion and difficulties that are exacerbated by operational demands for rapid delivery of early capability; (3) oversight and monitoring of contractors' system engineering and management practices is not executed consistently; (4) PM offices do not employ personnel who have the specialized skills needed to respond to all of the demands of their jobs; (5) PM offices perceive Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and Department of the Army (DA) policy and directives as being in constant flux, which makes it difficult to locate or develop interpretation expertise; (6) PM certification does not sufficiently recognize the value of developmental, operational, TSM, DA, or OSD assignments; and (7) some programs do not execute Integrated Product Teams (IPTs) effectively.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 2005
Accession Number
ADA447976

Entities

People

  • Kristi L. Keeler

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Agreements
  • Army Procurement
  • Best Practices
  • Business Administration
  • Configuration Management
  • Contractors
  • Contracts
  • Department Of Defense
  • Engineering
  • Executives
  • Information Exchange
  • Management Personnel
  • Military Acquisition
  • Program Management
  • Software Development
  • Systems Engineering

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Defense Acquisition Program Management
  • Software Engineering.