Department, Command and Agency leaders must also champion the generally accepted wisdom that lean principles, the intellectual source of agile practices, can be applied to Government acquisitions of both tangible and intangible products and services. Doing so simultaneously leads to improved delivery times, reduced costs, and improved quality.
While the claim of “better, faster, cheaper” may seem improbable or impossible, lean delivers these results using several basic, quantifiable principles harnessed for procurements in both commercial and Government arenas.
Because there are enormous differences between developing tangible and intangible products, as well as between large capital and speed-to-capability projects, the process of analyzing needs and defining features varies widely.
What the various agile approaches share is a beginning stage characterized by defining requirements and setting boundaries; an intermediate stage characterized by solution development; and a final stage characterized by scaling to production-level quantities.
Billions of dollars in contracted services each year are not subject to DoD requirements or documents and could benefit from agile practices. Therefore, it is worth noting that agile contracting may be applied to one part of the procurement process even if it is not used for the entire acquisition.
Department, Command and Agency leaders must campaign for change that moves organizational culture from “information hoarding” to the critically necessary “information sharing” mindset.
For Agile Government Contracting to work, Department, Command and Agency leaders need to be creative in developing, among other things, incentives for COs and Program Managers to apply the new approaches then share their questions, problems, and solutions in community forums providing personal safety and promoting risk taking, not punishing it.
Thus, Department, Command and Agency leaders must drive changes moving the organizational culture into an “information sharing” mindset by finding, funding, and supporting community forums and other similar initiates.