Ryan Tseng 🇺🇸’s Post

Our emerging requirements for the J-sUAS CDD are less dumb.

I would slip one more in there... Actually talk to the people on the ground doing the work, typically they already have a solution to the issue but no one has ever asked them..

By the time a Requirement makes its way into an acquisition package, it was influenced and morphed by a variety of individuals that are contextually detached from the building/creation of the thing they need. Requirements gathering always seems to conflate the “what”, “why”, and “how” — you have “SMEs” that understand the “why” really well, providing input on the “how” and it turns the Requirement definition into an inaccurate disaster. The Requirement becomes impossible to understand, fund, and build. I recommend managing context and input effectively during the Requirement development process; introduce self-awareness across the team that recognizes the “risk of the unknown” and the chaotic variables that an environment throws at an engineering initiative. Build that flexibility into the acquisition.

Love step 2… in many private and public sectors, there are too many edge cost centers, edge systems, edge procedures .. but no edge … actually drives people to the edge rather… bluntly put, gotta cut the edge to be cutting edge!! 😂

DoD will soon be unrecognizable in a great way (see as Vivek and Elon make this look like a business versus a good old greasing palms setup) I can’t even imagine any great successful company say “we need to pick vendor A because they check a box not they are the best vendor!). Billions saved in DoD and it will be fine tuned and run XX times better for it

On this we can agree.

It fails at step 0: allow gov to craft the requirement The Gov (to include DoD) needs to stay out of engineering and IT because they can't do it well. . . let them govern (policy) and fight (DoD)

Talk to the people performing the end tasks/processes before defining requirements. Having individuals two and three steps removed from reality when creating requirements is one of the many reasons they often miss the mark.