Annual brief de-brief

With so many pre-briefs for this brief, it’s only fitting to have a brief de-brief.

Today I’ll provide everyone some quick feedback from the annual brief I did for the Vice Commandant and the other members of the Acquisition Review Board.

It went better than I could have imagined. She understands the need for the project and the approach.  Everyone at the table recognized the project is critical and hard.

Here are the top five takeaways from my view:

Deliver quicker! Everyone would like to see us deliver capability more quickly. Keep looking for ways to make the major system acquisition process work more quickly for us.  We’ll have to re-examine the plan after we get the unconstrained cost estimate.  That’s an opportunity for us to adjust our strategy to deliver more quickly.

Cost Estimate will drive changes. Everyone understands that the schedule was based on having funding available to deliver at that rate. We built a product WBS and CEBD that aligned with the ORD requirements and schedule. We used those assumptions as the basis for a project office estimate and an independent cost estimate. Those estimates are based on the operational requirements unconstrained by the expected funding in the Department’s Resource Allocation Decision (RAD). If the LCCE exceeds the RAD, either the planned funding will need to increase to meet the need, or we’ll need to re-examine how we’re delivering the capability and find a way to do it within the RAD. I told the Vice those adjustments to strategy and schedule will happen with full involvement of the Sponsor and tech authorities. Please remember, the first step is to get the cost estimates and reconcile them to validate the model. Then we’ll be able to look objectively and transparently at the inputs and outputs and adjust our strategy as needed. There’s a willingness among senior leadership to see us “think differently” to find ways to deliver more quickly.

TASC uncertainty understood.  Unknown timing of contract award and timing of deployment within Coast Guard is part of our reality. Our strategy of accomplishing the integration in Segment 4, with the ability to do it in Segment 2 if needed, makes sense. Everyone also understands the enormous complexity of trying to do the TASC conversion at the same time as Segment 1. The foundation provided by Segment 1–a known COTS tool that tracks CI’s and the maintenance to support them–is critical. We’ll also have a track record with the prime contractor before trying to integrate efforts with the TASC team.

User support is critical. There was support all around the table for our plan for end user training. We’re using ALMIS as the example to follow for initial training and embedded help.  We’ll also steal ideas from other projects that are using interactive instructor led training. I shared a milSuite example in the last post, and I also have a few CG examples in the queue to share.

Use Plain English!  There was plenty of interaction throughout the brief. There were lots of questions from the Vice and discussion among the principals at the table. It was gratifying for me to see that the Sponsor and tech authorities in 1, 4, 6, and 8 all aligned. At the end, I asked the Vice if she had any questions. They’d all been answered during the brief, but she gave me one piece of feedback I took as one of the highest compliments I could get: she thanked me for using plain english. She explained that often these acquisition briefs are bogged down in “acquisition speak,” but that I’d done a good job explaining things in plain english. The remark wasn’t lost on the acquisition leadership. I think we’ll have much more liberty in the future to deviate from the templated briefs for senior leadership.

I’ll share more with smaller group, but I wanted to get some quick feedback to the group and to make sure you had access to the final version. I can’t share the whole brief because it’s acquisition sensitive. It includes elements of our strategy that haven’t been released publicly and expected future funding that is made public only as part of the President’s Budget each year.

I’ll also invite anyone in the room to share any observations from your perspective.

Everyone on the core team has access to the brief in CG Portal. If you don’t have access and need it, please shoot me a note and I’ll give you permission. I’ll warn you that some of the speaker’s notes aren’t complete. We rearranged the content before the final brief, and I just didn’t have time to update all the notes. We also added a few slides based VADM Currier’s feedback to show at a high level how the legacy systems would be brought into CG-LIMS. Those slides are in the backup section. We didn’t cover them in the brief, but they may serve as the basis for some future conversations on high level approach. At some point I’ll pull them out of the brief and share them separately with a wider audience.