How to establish a new culture in agile software acquisition

If we’re going to create a culture of agile acquisitions, we first need to change our behaviors.

To achieve delivery speeds necessary to win tomorrow’s wars, organizations need to redefine the status quo starting with the experiences they influence within their own ecosystem.

Companies like Uber, Airbnb and Netflix have created new business models that simply sidestepped the status quo. Powered by software, these companies have shown how quickly digital disruption can reshape slow-moving markets.

Since 2000, over half the companies on the Fortune 500 have been displaced.

“Software is eating the world.” -Marc Andreessen

If software is eating the world, then it’s absolutely eating acquisition bureaucracy.

“You can’t reorganize your way to continuous improvement and adaptiveness. Success lies in developing capability and habits in your people. It’s how they act and react”¹. -The DevOps Handbook

Let’s talk about how to create a “pocket of excellence” inside your organization which can be the catalyst for cultural change. Specifically, let’s talk about that fact that in establishing a new way of behaving required to successfully implement DoD 5000.87 “Software Acquisition Pathway”, DoD 5000.02 behaviors will not work.

Agile software acquisition requires a new culture where learning is prioritized over process/technology/templates.

Adherence to plan is replaced by creation of value-driven feedback loops as the top priority for the acquisition team.

Organizations implementing the software acquisition pathway are change agents on the front lines of a transformation. This transformation is not just a digital one; it is organizational.

Driving transformation is not easy and navigating this inside the world’s largest bureaucracy is not an easy task. Often, the acquisition community itself becomes the biggest blockage to transformation.

To overcome the bureaucracy, you need to create talent density around the desired behavior-patterns you want your organization to emulate.

-Process

A quantum leap in acquisition delivery speed is required to disrupt the acquisition world. The key ingredient that will drive this change is a commitment to continuous improvement. Organizations must create processes that make continuous process improvement as part of their daily work.

It cannot be continuous improvement or performing daily work. On the software engineering side, continuous improvement normally starts with a team building a single application and getting a minimal viable product (MVP) into production. The MVP approach is valuable because it it creates fast feedback cycles and teaches developers to use the the scientific method to validate value-driven hypotheses.

The MVP approach should should be applied to your acquisition processes as well. Start with an acquisition MVP, take a thin vertical slice of DoD 5000.87 (capability needs statement (CNS), user agreement (UA), acquisition strategy, test strategy, IP strategy, cost estimate, and product support strategy) and focus on getting a single “acquisition MVP” onto the software acquisition pathway. Doing this for a subset of your entire acquisition portfolio will help the acquisition community to unlearn DoD 5000.02 processes and create DoD 5000.87 best practices.

1. Learn acquisition innovation tactics
   Your acquisition team will need to learn agile acquisition best practices to include: modular contracting, use of a streamlined acquisition strategy summary³ (SASS), creation and staffing a CNS and UA, and the creation of a test and security strategy that leverages automation and embedded developmental test/operational test.
2. Create a learning foundation for the entire organization
   A software MVP should first start with a discovery and framing (D&F) process that dives deep into the acquisition value stream to build an informed acquisition MVP roadmap. This team should document the knowledge and learnings from D&F into an acquisition enablement repository, laying the foundation for rapid scaling. Key learnings which should be included in this knowledge repository include: libraries of acquisition documents (market research, SOO, SOW, SASS, CNS, UA, etc), value stream map of the acquisition process, overview of collaboration tools/processes needed for successful stakeholder engagement.
3. Remove organizational static friction
   The results of getting an acquisition MVP onto the software acquisition pathway will help you gain buy-in from the “frozen middle” within your organization.

The frozen middle is a group of people who initially block a transformation because they fear change will relinquish their existing control. Most of the frozen middle is satisfied with the status quo, because they have mastered the existing oversight and control processes within the organization.

Tying your digital transformation to an approved acquisition policy is a great first step to obtain buy-in from the frozen middle.

The most effective way to remove organizational friction is through transparency.

Creating transparency between the acquisition MVP team and stakeholders is a key ingredient for cultural change. The acquisition MVP team should push to establish a more collaborative and highly accountable management model at all levels within organization (IPT, senior materiel leader, sponsoring MAJCOM and program executive office). One way to do this is through the creation of growth boards. Growth boards reenforce alignment at all levels within the organization.

• Teams and Leadership have a clear shared understanding of what success looks like, leading to a growing sense of responsibility to achieving these goals.
• Cross-functional support becomes a reality, ensuring roadblocks to progress are removed more efficiently.
• Ability to change direction sooner and more objectively on the basis of agreed-upon metrics, enabling all to celebrate changes and radiate learnings across the organization.

-People

The goal of the acquisition MVP team is to define and re-enforce desired behavior-patterns until those behaviors become habit. Some key behaviors you should focus on creating include:

• Growing highly effective people
• Continuous feedback with each other
• Broad and deliberate transparency
• Visualize display for work and quality
• Daily interactions between acquisitions and development

This where strategy and leadership play a huge part within organizational transformation. Senior leaders should identify change agents within their organization, equip them with what they need, and get out of their way. How do you find a change agent?

Change agents are the ones that push back when they hear someone say, “this is how we’ve always done it.”

When a change agent hears “this is how we’ve always done it”, what they think is, “this is how we lose the next war”.

Another important ingredient for selecting an acquisition MVP team should be a growth mindset. People with a growth mindset believe their talents can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and input from others. In other words, they do not focus on being right or getting credit, but focus on being effective. This team should be small and dedicated to creating an acquisition MVP. The team should consist of one program manager, one contracting officer, one budget analyst, and one (on-call) lawyer.

To mitigate the risk of this team being suffocated by the bureaucracy and analysis paralysis, have this team learn while doing. They are not the acquisition center of excellence team or the managers; they are the ones inside the acquisition trenches building and running the products they created.

Additionally, leaders should avoid mandating that this team use pre-existing static templates. Avoid allowing this team to become the “ask the expert team” before they have established a smooth and repeatable flow. They should investing in pairing with digital experts and acquisition change agents that can help guide them along in their journey.

-Technology

In the digital world, the current set of typical program metrics of cost, schedule, and performance tell the wrong story. To implement an effective digital transformation, you need a new set of program management metrics.

New metrics need to be created to measure how fast a team is learning. New metrics should leverage digital tools to provide real-time data to senior leaders and decision makers. In the software world, the process of spending weeks to create a static report is obsolete. These reports should be replaced with data-driven dashboards which can be populated automatically.

Instead of investing weeks on writing a static report, acquisition and developers need to spend the same amount of time and energy on creating metrics that they can use in their daily work. Metrics which can be easily created, displayed, and analyzed. The acquisition MVP team should work with developers to define what metrics are important to the organization as a whole and create ways to leverage existing technology so the metrics can be easily created, displayed, and analyzed.

Some potential metrics include:

• Acquisition level: contract lead time and product team cost benchmarking.
• Test level: test automation coverage, application integration test success rates, and system integration test times.
• Mission level: metrics around achieving mission centered outcomes.
• Application level: transaction times, response times, data accuracy, etc.
• Infrastructure level: CPU load, data traffic, and memory usage.
• Deployment level: deployment lead times and deployment frequency.
• Operational level: health and availability, mean time to restore, incident response time, and change fail percentage.

Influencing cultures change starts with the admission that the status quo is needs to change. If your organization has come to this conclusion, a transformational strategy needs to be developed, and it should start at the tactical level.

Starting small, you can quickly convert local discoveries into global improvements.

The tactical level changes discussed in this article are from my “Day 1 Playbook for Acquisition Transformation”.

Next week, I’ll be discussing the scaling of organizational change outside of an acquisition MVP team.

If your organization needs help getting its digital transformation off the ground, Rise8 can help. We have a dedicated group of engineers and change agents to co-innovate with you. mnelson@rise8.us

1. DevOps Handbook, 2016. IT Revolution Publishing. Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis
2. https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodi/500087p.PDF?ver=virAfQj4v_LgN1JxpB_dpA%3D%3D
3. https://www.acquisition.gov/affars/acquisition-planning-0#_AFMC_PGI_5307.104-92