The Defense Modeling and Simulation Coordination Office presented the Naval Postgraduate School with an enormous challenge in 2006: design and deliver an educational program by 2008, segmented by career specialties, for 20,000 or more acquisition professionals, focusing on the effective use of modeling and simulation in acquisition. The acquisition workforce is central to force transformation, and education is the key to transforming that workforce. This paper describes the processes, lessons learned to date, and assessment plan for this project.

We applied a systems engineering approach to the problem of curricular design. The resulting solution consists of four spirals. The first spiral focused on defining the problem and ascertaining requirement. We developed our analysis based on factors such as our market segmentation of the acquisition workforce, the current resources available, the state of the modeling and simulation body of knowledge, the desired educational outcomes for each market segment, and the gaps that existed between those outcomes and the existing resources. At each step in the process, we involved key stakeholders from the acquisition, test and evaluation and training communities.

The results of the first spiral are the requirements generated, and subsequent lessons learned; they will be the focus of our discussion herein. We will also briefly summarize the other spirals, which are currently underway, that involve architecting the curricula in spiral two, course design and testing in spiral three, and delivery and assessment of the curriculum for spiral four.