This paper describes the JSIMS Enterprise approach to Joint development and reviews progress and lessons learned from the past year. The description identifies program challenges and roles and responsibilities of the Joint Program Office (JPO), Integration & Development (I&D) contractor, warfare domain Executive Agents (EA), and Development Agents (DA) and their contractors. Both the DoD oversight mechanism and the Enterprise organization are also discussed.
The most significant management challenges were buy-in and cooperation from the Service and Agency partners, harmonization of user requirements, and contractual and geographic diversity of participants. Success in Enterprise start-up depended on effective use of working groups sponsored by permanently established product teams. These groups had broad participation, focused agenda, defined products and duration.
Major achievements include integration of numerous service requirements into a single specification, leveraging the results of government and contractor sponsored technology programs, and management of distributed, Joint and Service-focused engineering and development. Defined standards and handoffs assure that successes and shortfalls are both visible. Development plans are based on incremental delivery and demonstrations that involve the multiple Service DAs and user sites.