“We talked about the aspects of acquisition: Do you use multiple capability development documents? Where in the timeline did you have pitfalls? What were your biggest cost drivers and delays in your schedule? How did it make your product more effective? And how do you continue to do it in the future? Sharing those kind of lessons was very helpful. We now have developed our schedule to avoid those kinds of pitfalls in the future,” Price said.
Price’s experience is just one of many success stories of acqui- sition professionals coming together and finding solutions to challenges encountered on the job by sharing lessons learned on the ALLP. “Te whole idea is for programs going through their milestone reviews to not keep making the same mistakes,” said Guite. “Tey [program managers] should be learning from each other and applying lessons that already have been learned.”
FLAGGING SUPPORT Since its inception in 2012, ALLP showed a steady growth of published lessons learned, with usage peaking in 2014 with 304 lessons submitted. However, usage waned after that, dropping to 155 and 49 for 2015 and 2016, respectively.
Tat decline corresponds to Shyu’s departure as assistant sec- retary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology (ASA(ALT)). “I think we lost a champion down in ASA(ALT) headquarters,” Guite said. “Prior to that, they were pushing for people to make sure they were conducting AARs and collect- ing lessons learned and pushing them to us. We were sending figures [to ASA(ALT)] to let them know how many accounts we had and lessons coming, and we had slides put into program status reviews and ACAT II program reviews.”
Guite said that with Shyu’s retirement and the change in opera- tional
tempo at ASA(ALT) headquarters, ALLP apparently
became less of a concern. “Given that they are busy and have a lot of other things to do,” he said, “I think it [ALLP] was low on the priority list.”
REDEFINED VISION Tat is going to change, thanks to a concentrated effort led by Lt. Gen. Michael E. Williamson, principal military deputy to the ASA(ALT) and Army director, acquisition career management.
Williamson has said many times that lessons learned aren’t valu- able unless they’re lessons applied. To capture what worked or didn’t work, pitfalls and success stories, and keep them in one repository to share with the acquisition community is a simple and effective concept. But if they’re not applied, they’re just
words. “We need to share knowledge through a common data- base that is both user-friendly and useful,” Williamson said.
Senior leadership, including Williamson, recently noted an
increase in project managers asking for guidance on challenges that they were facing—and many of those challenges had already been solved by someone else in the community and, in some cases, documented on the ALLP. “It was important to address the situation immediately by identifying the problems and finding a workable solution,” Williamson said.
An analysis found that the ALLP had become low-profile: Most of the acquisition community was not aware of the portal, return users were scarce, and lessons learned input had plummeted. To address those problems, ASA(ALT) formed a task force to rein- vigorate, re-emphasize and reintroduce the portal to all levels of the acquisition community as well as individual users.
“We had our initial brainstorming session, and everyone [agreed that] we have a lessons-applied problem. Te site is there; there- fore, the site must not be good and nobody’s using it. Terefore, we were not having our lessons applied,” said Maj. Shannon Tompson, 51A proponency officer for the U.S. Army Acqui- sition Support Center (USAASC) and team facilitator on the project.
After speaking at length with the site owners, Tompson found they’d been noting deficiencies in usage of the portal for a while. Te acquisition community was either not prioritizing submit- ting lessons or the lessons learned process “was not deemed to be useful, because not enough people were starting the ‘movement,’ indicating a cultural problem.”
“Tey had collected a lot of data and done surveys,” Tompson continued, “and it turns out that the root of the problem isn’t so much that the site is not useful. Te root of the problem is they can’t get folks to feed the system with lessons learned; that then would draw other users to pull those lessons learned and apply them to their particular situation.”
Tompson suggested that raising awareness of the lessons learned portal throughout an acquisition officer’s career progres- sion would increase its recognition and usage. “If we were to get them at the basic course as captains and junior majors and say,
‘Here’s this tool [ALLP] out there, and by the way, we’re going to do a small module and a practical exercise on how to use this tool,’ [we could] make it a part of the community culture.”
ASC.ARMY.MIL
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ACQUISITION
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