Better, faster, or cheaper? Now, you can pick three. The days of the government leading the charge in information technology (IT) development are long gone, as consumer demand for IT has eclipsed that of the government’s since PCs entered homes in the 1980s. Sectors drive technology development, which has created opportunities for the government to improve system performance quicker and less costly than before, by rapidly integrating technologies in which the government did not invest long term RDT&E. The DoD has matured its technology identification and selection capabilities in the last five years through the development of innovation networks as well as contractual vehicles to rapidly adopt them. With the means to identify, select, and procure commercial technologies, we can be better, faster, and cheaper, right? Almost. This model creates another gap, which leads many government programs back to the inevitable waterfall approach to systems development and acquisition. Often, the government establishes development teams to race to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) using Agile processes. Once the MVP is achieved, the government is tempted to view the MVP as ugly, fragile, and non-scalable. Rather than iterate to achieve the final solution, the program abandons the Agile process altogether, using the MVP as a reference implementation to form a requirements specification for a new solicitation which mirrors waterfall acquisition. This paper hypothesizes that government innovation initiatives regularly fall victim to this gap and documents the consequences of this issue. Further, this paper proposes processes to implement hybrid Agile approaches that take into account traditional, mandatory procurement and development constraints. Partnering with lead systems integrators who are Agile experts and have the requisite mission understanding to accept prudent risk breaks the iron triangle to achieve what has been deemed impossible by conventional acquisition canon – a better, faster, and cheaper solution.
Policy, Standards, Management, and Acquisition
Breaking the Iron Triangle with Commercial Technology Insertion
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