The Department of Defense (DoD) has received legislation and guidance from Congress in recent years to improve the speed and efficiency of the acquisition process. A significant challenge for DoD Project Managers (PMs) has been the administrative and documentation burden associated with a new program. Often times the documentation requirements are duplicative and exhaustive with little value added. The PM has to balance the compliance with regulatory directives with producing a quality system for the end user all the while ensuring adherence to statutory laws. In 2017 the Department of the Army, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army, Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (ASA(ALT)) produced guidance on implementing acquisition streamlining and cultural change. The Product Manager Cyber Resiliency and Training (PdM CRT) has fully embraced the streamlining guidance as they progress towards Milestone B with the Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE). One of the key tools for PMs to enable streamlining is the Simplified Acquisition Management Plan (SAMP).
PCTE is currently leveraging the SAMP to achieve Milestone B. A challenge the PCTE team experienced as work began on the SAMP was the lack of guidance, support, and approved examples. This paper will share the best practices, challenges, and solutions the PCTE team discovered as they went through the SAMP process to better enable the greater community to leverage our experience. Additionally, we will capture the transition and migration from a Traditional Milestone B process to SAMP, and compare and contrast the two approaches. We will describe the transition impacts for internal and external stakeholders and how we generated community wide buy in while addressing each of the stakeholders unique concerns, impacts, and questions. To conclude, we’ll provide recommendations to help the training and simulation community navigate through the acquisition documentation streamlining and tailoring process.