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DEFENSE ARJ JULY 2012
Remarks from ARJ EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Dr.Larrie D.Ferreiro

Relieving Joint Pain: Planning Government Acquisition of Complex Common Systems

Anthony C. Wicht and Edward F. Crawley

Commonality, an increasingly popular strategy in developing complex defense projects, leverages sharing or reuse across projects to significantly reduce life-cycle costs. Despite its potential within DoD as a best practice, programs focused on commonality have met with mixed success. This article argues that commonality strategies must be matched with complementary acquisition strategies to improve outcomes. Full, open competition is not the best acquisition strategy if commonality can unlock life-cycle affordability. Metrics and payment structures must consider the commonality goals to be achieved; otherwise, contractor motivations and government goals will be misaligned. The recommendations in this article draw on commonality research conducted on behalf of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which examined 19 DoD, commercial, and NASA case studies.

Inserting Agility in System Development
Matthew R. Kennedy and Lt Col Dan Ward, USAF

With the fast-paced nature of technology, rapidly fielding systems has never been more important. Success depends on well-defined requirements and the ability to rapidly respond to change during and after deployment. The inability to rapidly respond may cause the system to become obsolete before initial fielding. Creating a structure where processes allow for changes during system development requires restructuring system development values and principles at all levels. This article addresses progress toward agility and defines agile values and principles being used by agile organizations in the Business, System, and Software Aspects. It also defines operationally effective agile practices being utilized to implement those values and principles that provide a starting point for inserting agility into the system development process.

Identifying Organizational Conflict of Interest: The Information Gap
M. A. Thomas

As the volume of government contracting increases, so does the importance of monitoring government contractors to guard against Organizational Conflict of Interest (OCI). For contracting officers to identify OCIs, they must be able to identify the relevant business interests of a contractor’s affiliates. This information may be private or not easily obtained. Using newly released data to develop preliminary visualizations of contractor organizational structures shows the organizational structure of many contractors to be complex and multinational. The complexity and the lack of easily available public information make it very unlikely that contracting officers could identify OCIs without substantial improvements in government data collection.

Half-Life Learning Curves in the Defense Acquisition Life Cycle
Adedeji B. Badiru

Learning curves are useful for assessing performance improvement due to the positive impact of learning. In recent years, the deleterious effects of forgetting have also been recognized. Workers experience forgetting or decline in performance over time. Consequently, contemporary learning curves have attempted to incorporate forgetting components into learning curves. An area of increasing interest is the study of how fast and how far the forgetting impact can influence overall performance. This article introduces the concept of half-life analysis of learning curves using the concept of growth and decay, with particular emphasis on applications in the defense acquisition process. The computational analysis of the proposed technique lends itself to applications for designing training and retraining programs for the Defense Acquisition Workforce.

Decision Cost Model for Contractor Selection
Victor J. Apodaca and Peter C. Anselmo

As U.S. Government facilities age and new facilities are constructed, the need to hire contractors for an increasing number of government construction projects is imperative. The current government technical evaluation for contractor selection is less than optimal. This article introduces an alternative technical evaluation methodology to the current government contractor selection process: a Decision Cost Model (DCM) that can be applied to ensure cost-efficient contractors are selected in awarding construction contracts. Applying the DCM ensures contractors with the lowest expected total cost are recommended for project awards. Also presented are ways DCM can be applied to increase efficiency in the selection process for future government construction projects, while simultaneously meeting taxpayers’ expectations of receiving maximum value for their tax dollars.

Defense Acquisition Research Journal

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