A suite of changes to the acquisition lessons learned portal makes it easier to learn from others who’ve fought similar battles.
by Mr. Steve Stark and Mr. Robert E. Coultas
In April 2016, Karen Price needed guidance on an acquisition procedure that her office had encountered for the first time. Price is a senior logistics management specialist for the Joint Product Office for Elimination, part of the Joint Project Manager Guardian within the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense. Her office was brand new at the time, and she reached out to the Center for Army Acquisition Lessons Learned (CAALL), within the U.S. Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity (AMSAA).
“As they were starting up, they realized they were somewhat similar to a previous program, so they got together with core people from that group to discuss lessons that they had and to make sure that they were aware of those and could avoid” similar mistakes, said Kevin M. Guite, team lead for Army Acquisition Lessons Learned.
Representatives from the other organization, the Joint Project Manager for Chemical Avoidance (JPM NBC CA), met with Price and her team to share JPM NBC CA’s experiences.
“Since we were going down that path developing products to disable or destroy chemical warfare material,” Price said, “we asked if we could get together and take some of the lessons learned that they had throughout the acquisition life cycle.”
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
While the products may be different, the overall processes of Army acquisition haven’t changed much over the years—there probably isn’t a new problem, only the same problem in slightly different form. The beauty of lessons learned is not unlike going online to watch a YouTube video to learn how to do macramé or fix a leaking faucet. It’s knowledge management. So, whether the challenge is with contracting, cost overruns, scheduling, negotiations or anything else acquisition-related, someone has probably gone through it before. And if that someone has taken the time to write up a lesson learned, it’s going to save the next person from having to reinvent the wheel. That’s the idea behind the Army Acquisition Lessons Learned Portal (AALLP).
According to Guite, the portal grew out of a recommendation from the 2010 Army Acquisition Review (also known as the Decker-Wagner Study) that the Army should develop a single database “that captures appropriate programs, issues, trends, solutions and successes in acquisition programs.” In 2012, then Army Acquisition Executive Heidi Shyu issued a memo directing that all acquisition category (ACAT) programs conduct after-action reviews (AARs) at major milestone events and program terminations. Those would then be collected in one database to be analyzed, archived and disseminated throughout the acquisition enterprise. The AALLP quickly became the authoritative source of Army acquisition lessons learned.
Interest in the portal was considerable, and Army AL&T began highlighting lessons learned in its Ground Truth column, which quickly became one of the magazine’s more popular features.
AALLP FOSTERS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Acquisition is a complex, multiplayer endeavor, and solid acquisition knowledge is generally hard won. It’s worth managing that knowledge carefully, and documenting lessons learned in the portal is one way to do that. (Image by Ellagrin/iStock)
LESSON APPLIED
Price and her core team met with the JPM NBC CA team representatives and a representative from the CAALL, who captured the lessons for ALLP. Their meeting resulted in a lesson learned on the AALLP: LL_1109: Ensuring all stakeholders are integral to the decision-making process is part of the open, honest communication and teamwork essential for successful program execution.
“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 acquisition professionals coming together and finding solutions to challenges encountered on the job by sharing lessons learned on the AALLP. “The whole idea is for programs going through their milestone reviews to not keep making the same mistakes,” said Guite. “They [program managers] should be learning from each other and applying lessons that already have been learned.”
FLAGGING SUPPORT
Since its inception in 2012, AALP 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.
That decline corresponds to Shyu’s departure as assistant secretary 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 collecting 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 operational tempo at ASA(ALT) headquarters, AALLP 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.”
DON’T REINVENT THE WHEEL: SEARCH THE PORTAL
Recent updates to the lessons learned portal make it easier to search—you can save search terms, see what others in your organization are searching, and bookmark results for later. (Image by Varijanta/iStock)
REDEFINED VISION
That 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 valuable 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 database 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 AALLP. “It was important to address the situation immediately by identifying the problems and finding a workable solution,” Williamson said. An analysis found that the AALLP 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 reinvigorate, 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. The site is there; therefore, the site must not be good and nobody’s using it. Therefore, we were not having our lessons applied,” said Maj. Shannon Thompson, 51A proponency officer for the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center (USAASC) and team facilitator on the project.
After speaking at length with the site owners, Thompson found they’d been noting deficiencies in usage of the portal for a while. The acquisition community was either not prioritizing submitting lessons or the lessons learned process “was not deemed to be useful, because not enough people were starting the ‘movement,’ indicating a cultural problem.”
“They had collected a lot of data and done surveys,” Thompson continued, “and it turns out that the root of the problem isn’t so much that the site is not useful. The 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.”
Thompson suggested that raising awareness of the lessons learned portal throughout an acquisition officer’s career progression 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.”
AALLP FOSTERS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Acquisition is a complex, multiplayer endeavor, and solid acquisition knowledge is generally hard won. It’s worth managing that knowledge carefully, and documenting lessons learned in the portal is one way to do that. (Image by Ellagrin/iStock)
EASIER ACCESS AHEAD
According to Guite, several technical improvements have been made to the portal. Gaining access to the site is simpler, and navigation has improved, thanks to recent upgrades. “We have redesigned the landing pages [for access] based on the users’ account types. So if you’re a PEO [program executive office] user, you’ll be able to see recent lessons submitted by your organization and some of the searches that people are doing, and bookmark your favorite lessons and documents to get to them quickly.”
Other enhancements include a redesigned home page with simplified menus and the capability to see lesson activity occurring throughout the portal, such as recent lessons, as well as the ability to save common search strings that can be quickly recalled and executed in future AALLP sessions. Also under consideration is a proposal to permit contract users to access the entire portal instead of limiting them to inputting lessons only. “We realize that contractors are a valuable asset. They have great experience that we want to capture. That was a restriction we had when we first set up the portal,” said Guite. Getting that relaxed, he said, will lead to more users submitting their experiences and research.
Additional efforts are underway that will take advantage of social media features to further ease the exchange of lessons and best practices within the Army acquisition enterprise. Working with ASA(ALT) and the USAASC, the CAALL plans several initiatives to:
- Leverage user forum software to support discovery and sharing of timely acquisition topics;
- Provide access to podcasts and webinars, allowing acquisition experts to disseminate valuable knowledge throughout the community;
- Develop a dynamic contact list to easily identify experts across the acquisition enterprise that can support information exchange on specific acquisition challenges.
CONCLUSION
“Lessons learned [that are] properly documented and analyzed are of enormous value to the acquisition community, and go a long way toward improving the acquisition process,” Williamson said. “We just need to focus the mission on the easy sharing of information between those who have the answers based on experience and those searching for them.”
With the current budget climate, Guite said, “You’ve got to do things smarter. You want to make sure you don’t repeat the same issues that others have already figured out. So if you can get on [the AALLP] and be smarter with your time and money, hopefully you can get programs out under budget and on schedule.”
For more information, go to the Army Acquisition Lessons Learned Portal at https://apps.aep.army.mil/ALLP.
MR. STEVE STARK is senior editor of Army AL&T magazine. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from Hollins University and a B.A. in English from George Mason University. In addition to more than two decades of editing and writing about the military, science and technology, he is, as Stephen Stark, the bestselling ghostwriter of several consumer-health-oriented books and an award-winning novelist.
MR. ROBERT E. COULTAS is an editor for Army AL&T magazine and an Army AL&T news blog editor. He is a retired Army broadcaster with more than 43 years of combined experience in public affairs, journalism, broadcasting and advertising. He’s Level I trained in program management, has won numerous Army Keith L. Ware Public Affairs Awards and is a DOD Thomas Jefferson Award recipient.
This article will be published in the January – March 2017 issue of Army AL&T Magazine.
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