Rapid Capability Delivery to the End User is the Goal

“We are clearly in a time of rapid change in the space strategic environment,” Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb recently told the 2024 Space Policy Symposium, “one which does not favor the slow or those resistant to change.” Multiple senior leaders have highlighted the need for speed in space acquisition, but how does an acquisition system designed for exquisite, one-of-a-kind systems adapt to a new paradigm?

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Our Responsibility Is to Rapidly Deliver Capability to the End User

This ethos recognizes, first and foremost, that success in acquiring a space system should be measured by the capability it provides to the end user to meet their operational need. The end user may be the Joint Force warfighter in tactical operations, an intelligence analyst processing data for actionable indicators and warnings, or a scientist performing planetary research. To the end user, the effective use of space system capabilities is paramount. This is applicable not only to the Department of Defense but to any agency ? in the Intelligence Community, in civil space, and even in commercial industry ? that seeks to establish a development flywheel to accelerate deployment and delivery.

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The Agile Acquisition and Rapid Deployment Ethos

As illustrated in Figure 1, agile acquisition programs strive to be:

• End-user Driven: Knowing the end user’s trade space by regularly engaging them from the beginning.
• Bold: Getting comfortable being uncomfortable and taking informed risks in the context of program priorities.
• Team-Centered: Trusting peers, implementing short decision chains, and adapting roles when needed.
• Decision-Oriented: Converging rapidly to a minimum viable product that meets the need.
• Timely: Delivering acceptable products at speed.

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How do we apply the agile ethos? Here are some tips:

Be End-User Driven?

The true end users of a space system are not generally the operators of that system, but the users who are relying on the system to meet their mission objectives. Rapid and agile teams spend significant effort up front on end-user engagement. A clear understanding of the system’s operational end use is of utmost importance for agile teams; it is what enables them to translate objectives quickly into solutions, make effective cost, schedule, and technical trades, and manage emerging issues. In many cases, end users prefer a “good enough” solution today compared with waiting for an exquisite solution later. To achieve this:

• Value ? and regularly solicit ? input from users and their support organizations. Establish formal mechanisms with a regular cadence to drive development decisions. Build effective relationships through additional informal engagements with the user community.
• Understand the minimum viable product (MVP) required to achieve the end-user’s needed capability for this iteration. Establish operationally driven priorities that allow the team to make trades within the performance boundaries of that MVP.
• As much as possible, develop flexible, scalable, interoperable, and maintainable solutions that allow the end users to adapt the system to changing requirements. Strive for designs that can be scaled in speed, capacity, or response time, that can survive and operate in multiple environments, or that make use of common interfaces.

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Be Bold

In many situations, a quick-turn product is better than a higher-fidelity result that is late to need. Supporting customer decision-making is difficult in the best of times, let alone when information is lacking because of limited resources. This can be uncomfortable for programmatic and technical staff as they balance complex trades of schedule, cost, and performance. To be effective in this environment:

• Across the team and with stakeholders, practice making decisions when complete. Avoid “analysis paralysis;” unless it is known that relevant high-quality information is coming soon, a hard decision isn’t made any easier by waiting.
• Do not euphemize risk. Prepare for failure. As part of the team’s risk management, ensure impacts are understood relative to the minimum viable product, what trades (including descopes) can keep the design within the acceptable performance space, how realized risk will be communicated among stakeholders, and what actions will be taken going forward.
• Focus on the “big rocks” that most impact design, development, and performance across the acquisition lifecycle:? interfaces, critical requirements verification and validation, Do No Harm and Space Flight Worthiness Criteria checklists, and end-to-end tests. Pay more attention to the areas that really matter (e.g., surviving launch, communicating, maintaining power-positive conditions); the system can be recovered from many anomalies if these core aspects operate as designed.

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Be Team-Centered

Agile program offices are typically made up of small teams with short leadership chains that must make decisions quickly. Rapid acquisition teams lack the resources, time, and funding to chase every issue to resolution or to double-check all work. In such circumstances, teamwork is key:

• Trust in the team, including all partners and contractors. Ensure each team member and organization is meeting what is expected of them but that as a team they are supporting others that need additional help to succeed. Peer reviews with external experts are valuable for preventing small-group blind spots and groupthink.
• Ensure that the team structure, including stakeholders, does not devolve into a construct in which many leaders must agree to move forward but it takes only one to veto progress or decisions.
• Collaborative teams leverage collaborative environments with common access to information. Routinely work on shared documents on a server and avoid local sharing and editing; this allows progress to continue as personnel availability changes.

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Be Decision-Oriented

Rapid teams cannot wait for all the information needed, so they must focus on understanding the end-user’s needs and employing strong systems engineering practices. The simpler and more robust a design, the more likely it is to succeed. To achieve such a mindset:

• Establish a true minimum viable product (MVP) with descoping options, and rigorously prioritize objectives within a defined hierarchy of schedule, cost, and performance. Decisions and trades must be traced back to the operational needs.
• Consciously defer lower-priority objectives to devote resources to the highest-priority mission objectives and the MVP. Validate key decisions with end users and develop tests and analyses that will clearly communicate the performance implications to them during the development.
• Design for simplicity and robustness, rather than efficiency. Allocate healthy margin to critical parameters, even if that means not achieving the full capability from the system (e.g., implement robust safe modes).

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Be Timely

Agile programs recognize time as a fundamental threat and look for opportunities where decisions can advance the design without undue risk. The longer a project takes, the more external change will impact the project (e.g., requirements changes, funding changes, evolution of the threat, the progression of technology, changing emphasis or commitment of stakeholders). Pay attention to the race, not just the finish line. Optimal solutions are inevitably schedule and cost intensive. Agile and rapid teams focus instead on delivering capability quickly and constantly evolving the state of the art. Practical considerations include:

• Make timely decisions using the information available now. Do not hold options open hoping for a perfect design; employ them to quickly resolve difficult trades.
• Prioritize risk reduction efforts that have the most impact relative to the desired outcome (e.g., system MVP); perform work that has the highest ratio of technical risk reduced to programmatic risk incurred.
• Remember that every requirement, every analysis, and every test drives schedule and cost into the program. Ensure the team is balancing the volume of those schedule drivers with realizing an effective outcome for the end user within the risk profile and priorities of the program.

Applying the Ethos: Agile Acquisition to Enable Rapid Deployment

Many projects are familiar with these principles and adopt them within the framework and context of their acquisition environment. The most critical success factor is the team responsible for the program and for delivering capability to the end user.

• Successful agile teams operate through ambiguity; recognize that progress does not always re-quire precision; understand and manage risk within program priorities; understand their element in the context of the whole system and how it will provide operational effects; and promote collaboration to find options and solutions.
• Key to this is effective, open, collaborative relationships among the end user, program leadership, technical contributors, contracting officers, security officers, customers, stakeholders, and contractors, all of which are enabled by tools (including networks at appropriate security levels) that create effective environments in which to collaborate.

Successful teams with supportive infrastructures and stakeholder alignment have the synergy and synchronization to rapidly execute the mission throughout development, test, training, deployment, and sustainment.

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Barbara Braun is the Assistant General Manager in the Agile Acquisition Division of The Aerospace Corporation. Within Aerospace, she has also led support to the Space Rapid Capabilities Office and the Department of Defense Space Test Program, and has served as the Deputy Corporate Chief Engineer. She has supported the development, test, and launch of new and emerging capabilities for a wide range of customers from across the space enterprise, including DOD and academic laboratories, civil space organizations such as NASA and the USGS, and emerging commercial providers. She is a subject-matter expert for Aerospace’s Center for Space Policy and Strategy and has written extensively on policy and mission assurance concerns for small and non-traditional satellites.

Geoffrey Reber is a Principal Engineer in the Defense Systems Group at The Aerospace Corporation. In this role he coordinates Aerospace FFRDC support across multiple national security space procurement offices and U.S. government or military end-users. His technical background is in propulsion system engineering: work which involved either operations or acquisition support, multi-organization coordination, and mission assurance/risk management. Prior to joining Aerospace, Reber worked for Boeing Integrated Defense Systems. He earned his BS and MS degrees in aeronautics and astronautics engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Patrick Stadter?is the General Manager of the Agile Acquisition Division at The Aerospace Corporation. Patrick previously held leadership positions at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) in the disciplines of space systems development, planetary exploration, space control and security, multidomain warfighting, integrated air and missile defense, weapons and combat systems, and advanced science and technology applications. He served as the Deputy Mission Area Executive for Theater Defense in the Air and Missile Defense Sector. Patrick serves on the Department of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board and has held board positions for NASA as a member of the Standing Review Board for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission and the National Academies of Sciences as a review committee member for the National Research Council Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences. He holds a PhD from Pennsylvania State University, an MS from Johns Hopkins University, and a BS from the University of Notre Dame, all in Electrical Engineering.

Getting It Right focuses on industry collaboration for mission success by sharing lessons learned, best practices, and engineering advances in response to the nation’s toughest challenges. It is published by the Aerospace Corporate Chief Engineer's Office and may be reached at [email protected].