• Mr. Stephen P. Welby
• Director, Systems Engineering

Recent congressional and Secretary of Defense acquisition reform initiatives place increased emphasis on integrated systems engineering (SE) and developmental test and evaluation (DT&E). This emphasis by the senior executive level offers the technical community a great opportunity to positively influence the outcomes of DoD acquisition programs.

In the past few years, our focus has been on the execution of programs at Milestone B and beyond. As a result of our lessons learned and various studies of the acquisition process, it is clear that we need to conduct more pre-Milestone B risk reduction activities such as robust analysis of alternatives (AoA), competitive prototyping, modeling and simulation, more detailed architecture development, and technology risk assessment to better inform our cost estimates and the program and technical plans required at Milestone B.

To meet this challenge, my organization is focusing on a variety of initiatives:

• Workforce Development: We are focusing on improving acquisition program performance by aligning with the DoD Components to enhance the capability and capacity of the technical management workforce. For example, we are identifying workforce competencies crucial for executing SE, T&E, and production, quality, and manufacturing functions within acquisition programs. We are developing strategies to support the "Recruit—Train—Retain" objectives laid out in the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act Section 852, and strategies to enable realistic workforce development by ensuring education and training requirements are balanced with job demands. We have an effort underway to establish a Body of Knowledge (BoK) and a Graduate-level Reference Curriculum for systems engineering.
• Early Systems Engineering: Our team is working on identifying early systems engineering gaps and deficiencies and establishing policy and guidance to address those gaps. We have developed an Acquisition Guidance Model (AGM) to identify early SE activities and products and their relationship to key elements of program formulation. We held a Program Manager Workshop at DAU to facilitate PM-OSD dialogue on 5000.02 and to coordinate the role of early SE. Future activities include documenting guidance on SE support to program formulation, working with DAU to update DAWIA courses to reflect early SE results, and extending AGM to address T&E and specialty engineering activities and products during early SE.
• Simplified Defense Acquisition Guidance: SSE is responsible for developing and maintaining consistent engineering and DT&E policy and guidance in support of the warfighter. We have initiated a guidance streamlining initiative to limit content to information directly pertaining to SE policy, to improve readability, to ensure the guidance maps to policy, and to align DAG language to primary source references including Component documents. My team will develop new guides to cover content that is not directly traceable to policy or covered by existing sources such as the Data Management and Functional Architecture Development Guides.
• Proactive Early Program Measures: SSE is initiating a study of common Pre-Milestone B systems engineering activities to determine activities that support the establishment of meaningful leading indicators to acquisition program success. The indicators would resemble those used by launch operators to make the final go/no go launch decision. The study will seek to uncover predictable relationships within the areas of technology and interface maturity, requirements definition and stability, staffing skill sets, and other areas. Once validated, each indicator will represent a single element of a more comprehensive picture (dashboard) of the underlying program's probability to execute successfully (program signature).