INDUSTRY DAY OPENS DOORS
be made for that block of time where there could be an open forum for any interested party, member or not. Tis would allow ARDEC and PM CCS to announce the event to the public through FedBizOps and give DOTC and NAC an opportunity to engage prospective new members. Many prospective participants would already be on site, reducing travel costs and providing an incentive to stick around and learn about the emerging requirements when they may not oth- erwise have been interested enough to make the trip.
ARDEC and the DOTC agreed on an event format that would achieve the two primary goals and result in everyone walking away with more knowledge than they started with. Te first session, open to everyone, focused on the government conveying the emerging requirements to the full audience. Te second, a closed- door session, allowed interested parties to present how they felt they could address those requirements and what the current state of their capabilities were.
When it comes to presenting the material, it can be tempting for the government to go beyond the facts and into conjecture and theories on what exactly the solu- tion looks like. Te key is to stick with the facts as they are known and let the audience use its expertise to develop solu- tions based on the requirements. In this case, the government team focused on the capability gap, characteristics desired by the initial capabilities document and the driving external forces such as policy constraints. Te intent is not to answer all the questions participants may have, but to get all the combined experience and expertise in the room thinking about the problem.
Once they hear what the government team has to say, it is up to the representatives
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from industry and academia to decide if they have something relevant to the problem worth sharing. Te individual sessions provided them the opportunity to demonstrate their interest and capa- bilities in an “intellectual-property safe environment.” Significantly fewer firms decided to meet with the government team in the individual sessions, which itself
is a valuable data point that sets expectations for the future.
INDUSTRY DAY FIRST OF MANY STEPS TOWARD PARTNERSHIP Successful partnerships are not built on a single engagement. Te industry day is the initial event in a long, collabora- tive development process. At this stage, requirements are evolving rapidly and the program plan is becoming clearer week by week. Armed with the knowl- edge shared during the industry day, the interested potential proposers sharpened pencils and started developing their con- cepts. Meanwhile,
the program team
continued to build the necessary detail into the competitive prototyping strategy.
Another advantage of the DOTC pro- posal process that was particularly useful during this stage was the ability for the government and contractor team to col- laborate on the development of their
CONCLUSION Looking back, the obstacles that appeared to exist really turned into opportuni- ties, which had a ripple effect through the early phases of acquisition. Engaging industry with the assistance of ARDEC, DOTC and NAC opened possibilities that otherwise may not have existed. PM
proposal. Collaboration must stop once proposals are submitted, but up to that point cooperation is encouraged to ensure that everyone is on the right path. Te beginning of the proposal develop- ment period provided a logical point for a follow-on group engagement. (See Figure 2.) Te government plan for executing the competitive prototyping phase was further defined, the contractors started pulling together their concepts and team- ing between primes and subs had taken place.
To maintain competitive fairness, it was important that information flowed consistently across the board from the government team to the proposing con- tractors, so it made sense to pull everyone together for another industry day. Hav- ing made it through the first industry day, the hurdles faced the second time were minimal, and it was smooth sailing toward awards.
The intent is for industry to help identify risks, quantify affordability and define development timelines. That is information that can feed into the AoA and ensure a well-informed path forward.
Army AL&T Magazine
July-September 2016
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