Does Anybody Out There Understand the Requirements Process

Abstract

Beginning in 1993, over the course of more than a year, a group of 14 individuals from Air Force Space Command and the Space and Missile Systems Center pursued a charter established by senior Air Force officials. Their primary goal was to determine what was wrong with the requirements process and make recommendations to fix it. In the course of developing recommendations, many experts from the field were invited to present their perspective. Individuals came from the Defense Systems Management College, the Air Force Institute of Technology, the Air Force Office of Aerospace Studies, individual program directors and managers from a number of system program offices, different major command requirements personnel, and even a noted expert and author in space requirements and architecture from the U.S. Air Force Academy. The findings were extensive and, for training; documentation; responsibilities/resources; planning and teamwork; customer satisfaction; and modifications, upgrades, and follow-on programs. That study was used as the basis for the comments in this article. What's wrong with the requirements process? Is the process still broken? Those questions raised significant problems in the early 1990s and continue to be asked today by people from all military services. The requirements process is inextricably tied to other key questions in the acquisition environment, such as why does it take so long to field systems and why are costs seemingly always much higher than predicted? I would like to know if any of the problems we saw in the early 1990s have been solved (and whether any of the recommendations have been enacted and are useful). Did the new Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System approved on June 24, 2003, actually improve anything or did the same problems simply get rearranged under new titles? Is the requirements process still broken?

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA527816

Entities

People

  • Mikael S. Beno

Organizations

  • Defense Acquisition University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Human Systems
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Air Force
  • Air Force Facilities
  • Aircrafts
  • Commerce
  • Defense Planning
  • Defense Systems
  • Deficiencies
  • Materials
  • Military Acquisition
  • Procurement
  • Program Management
  • Students
  • Systems Management
  • Task Performance And Analysis
  • Training
  • United States Air Force Academy

Readers

  • Applied Combinatorial Optimization and Logic Circuit Design.
  • Defense Acquisition Program Management
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.

Technology Areas

  • Space