The U.S. Army Project Manager Soldier Training (PM ST) is embracing the vision of the Software Acquisition Pathway (SAP) as a natural extension to its Live Training Transformation (LT2) vision. PM ST is continuously evolving its LT2 Software Factory approach for software acquisition, support, and sustainment. With this policy guidance for a SAP framework from the Under Secretary of Defense, the LT2 gains further justification in its advancement of Agile, DevSecOps and Cloud Native. SAP specifically focuses on Agile and DevSecOps as a proven approach to increasing the probability of fielding successful capabilities to warfighters at the speed of relevance. This paper addresses the use case of applying SAP for a well-established portfolio of systems that must remain fully capable and operational while addressing the emergent needs of the evolving warfighter. This paper makes specific recommendations to enhance the DevSecOps pipeline to incorporate inherent support for variation across the portfolio and connectivity to the rest of the Tech Data Package necessary for fielding and sustaining complete systems. Additionally, this paper recommends Agile extensions that better enable government integration into a portfolio governance model to handle simultaneous capability development in a government owned baseline, where changes create cascading impacts and enable added portfolio value beyond the initial development effort. These recommendations can be used to tailor the SAP framework for a portfolio use case to allow for focused development on minimum viable products, allow for extremely low risk incorporation of legacy content into minimum viable capability releases, and more quickly enable full operational capabilities. Additionally, these approaches allow a significantly reduced sustainment cost directing more funding allocation to adding incremental value in future releases. By incorporating these recommendations, organizations can better apply the SAP framework for continued successes in deploying new capacities into their portfolio of systems.
Policy, Standards, Management, and Acquisition
Scaling Software Acquisition Pathway to Manage a Portfolio of Systems
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