Space Acquisition - Air Force Space Command

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• Constantly strive to be the best we can be. • Have unconditional passion. The world is changing faster than ever. To manage change in lean years and become high performance team players, we must continue to learn to: • Apply the tools, ideas, and inspiration to be success-oriented in the midst of continually changing environments. • Emphasize education and training to overcome barriers to career and personal success while going beyond personal and organizational limits. • Be active leaders in lean management processes. • Foster a collaborative environment. • Recruit, retain, educate, and produce a highly-motivated and accountable workforce. • Develop effective communicators and high-performance team players in managing change. • Cultivate and encourage future leaders. We Can Do Better; We Must Do Better So what about you, the reader Does the joy of service ignite a flame within you Do you have that passion If so, enjoy it. Enjoy it because you are a vital leader in the world’s best acquisition force. Not only will you be a valuable asset to the PMAG and the Air Force acquisitions community, but it will also benefit your personal life. Live your personal passions, develop your acumen as a spouse, as a father or mother, as a neighbor, a civic member—your passion of excellence will be absolutely contagious to everyone around you throughout your life. For the acquisitions community to be a part of the world’s most respected Air and Space Force, we must innovatively and collaboratively develop ourselves to be valuable and knowledgeable workers. Learn the PMAG methodology, and live it! We simply have to invest in our future generation through relentless mentoring and coaching with a content-based, and not just process-based, focus. We can not merely say the right things, but we need to do the right things, and understand why it is that we are doing them. Words are nice; they tell good stories and paint vivid pictures. But they are worthless if they do not connect somehow with their audience or inspire them to action or make a change in some small way. The PMAG brings substance through disciplined execution and focuses on content while de-emphasizing automatic delegation. A fundamental aspect of the PMAG is the integrated team’s approach to producing compounded products and services. We must do the innovative work necessary to make Air Force acquisitions better. If you take nothing else with you from this article, take this: We CAN do better; we MUST do better. If we all pick ourselves up, reinvigorate ourselves and remember what it is that truly inspires us—about service, about development acquisitions, about our country—we can reinvigorate this acquisitions community! You say you are already a true leader, a team player, you do everything right and you know everything I tell you now that even I am not so perfect; even I continue to improve after 29 years of service. We can all do better. We all must do better! Complacency and passivity cannot permeate our culture. Competency, collaboration, and content-based performance—these are the tools, these are the keys to our success. Feel the buzz and the change in the world around you. Stand up, commit, execute! We absolutely need every one of us to put in that extra contribution toward improving, toward acquisition excellence. All of us can improve, all of us can be more passionate, and all of us can do better. This is a commitment all of us—in every organization and under every command—can make right now. This is a commitment all of us NEED to execute right now. We will all have to step up to this; real leadership has to come from within every one of us. Be a high-performance team player, live the PMAG model, and be a team leader. Be the best in everything you do, and push yourself to be even better than that. We can do better; we must do better. We shall be the ultimate program managers in the world’s premier acquisition work force! Notes: 1 Aerotech News and Review 2, no. 17 (14 November 2008). Col Mun H. Kwon (BS, Chemistry, University of Maryland; MS, Systems Management, USC; MS, Strategic Studies, Air War College; PhD, Business Administration, US International University) is deputy for program management and system integration directorate, Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), Los Angeles AFB, California. He leads the center’s Program Execution and Analysis Group, Acquisition Center of Excellence Group, and Program Management Assistance Group to Support the SMC’s mission Colonel Kwon entered the Air Force as a ROTC graduate from University Maryland, College Park in 1980. His career has spanned a wide variety of acquisition program management, education, air staff, and materiel leader assignments including Solid Rocket Motors budget analyst, launch vehicles acquisition manager, Titan 34D Solid Rocket Motors Production and Launch Services project manager, Space Shuttle Payload Integrator, Precision Lightweight GPS Receivers program manager, Advanced Space Technology (XR) program manager, AF/XP chief scientist, professor of systems and acquisition management, National Missile Defense program control chief, dean of education and technology, National Defense University, ACAT I national space systems program manager, and commander of materiel acquisition group. Among his many awards, Colonel Kwon has been awarded the Defense Meritorious Service Medal with two oak leaf cluster, Air Force Meritorious Service Medal with two oak leaf cluster, Joint Service Commendation Medal with one oak leaf cluster, Air Force Commendation Medal with one oak leaf cluster, Joint Service Achievement Medal, Air Force Achievement Medal, National Defense Service Medal, and Global War on Terrorism Service Medal. 21 High Frontier
Space Acquisition: Space and Missile Systems Center Keys to Acquisition Success Ms. Catherine J. Steele Vice President, Strategic Space Operations The Aerospace Corporation INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND Acquisition success is the result of effective and efficient operation of the combined government/contractor team. Specifically, success lies in creating the conditions that allow the prime contractor to deliver a product that is responsive to the operational need and within the cost and schedule targets. Keys to creating those conditions are the following: • Creation of stable, achievable operational requirements and concepts of operation (CONOPS). • Conduct of concept definition and alternative selection driven by realistic technology maturity and risk appraisals. • Extensive, thorough systems engineering preparation that continues throughout the program’s life cycle. • Effective program execution driven by maintenance and control of cost, schedule, performance, and risk baselines. • Definition and management of key external factors, including system of systems impacts. • Continuous, proactive identification, mitigation, and retirement of risks during the life of the system. • Perceptive, aggressive testing characterized by stressful testing at the lowest possible level of assemblage. • An objective, rigorous mission assurance process driven by lessons learned on other programs. The Aerospace Corporation operates the Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) for space. Aerospace shares the characteristics of all FFRDCs: a not-for-profit company, prohibited from competition with for-profit entities (and, therefore, free of most conflict of interest issues), that is predominately, but not exclusively, under contract to the US government. Unique among the FFRDCs, Aerospace specializes in the engineering disciplines associated with on-orbit spacecraft (both hardware and software components) and any ground-based command and control, communications, security, or cyber issues related to them. Aerospace program office teams support the entire National Security Space (NSS) community, including the Air Force, Navy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and intelligence community. Aerospace engineers and scientists are split equally between generalists in functional or program offices colocated with a government team and specialists in a centralized organization who are matrixed to the program offices when and as needed. This combination allows both breadth and depth of support. Breadth comes from the corporation’s participation in all NSS programs, with the attendant ability to provide lessons learned and experience across the entire community. Depth comes from Aerospace’s world-class, on-call cadre of specialists in all facets of spacecraft technology who provide specific, targeted expertise to our government customer’s hardest problems. Aerospace contributes to each of the eight key acquisition success activities listed above through: • Requirements/CONOPS: Aerospace provides engineering support to operational users to help define realistic and complete operational requirements early in a program so that an executable development plan can be built on stable requirements. • Concepts/Alternatives: Aerospace provides engineering support to Development Plans organizations to monitor and evaluate contractor concept development activities. Aerospace created and operates the Concept Design Center, where competing concepts can be modeled and compared in an unbiased setting. • Systems Engineering: Systems engineering is the Aerospace core competency; the corporation provides and maintains the systems engineering cadre for most NSS programs throughout their life cycle. • Program Execution: Aerospace provides the core technical capability to create, maintain, and assess the program technical baseline and the technical inputs to the cost and schedule baselines. Determination of the absolute program risk level and selection of relative risk levels posed by alternative courses of action is a government function. By providing the government with the technical and schedule risk assessments needed to make an informed decision, Aerospace plays a critical role in risk baseline activities. • Management of External Factors: By virtue of its wide participation in NSS programs, Aerospace identifies cross-program issues within NSS and facilitates their solution. Aerospace, working with its sister FFRDCs, also participates in efforts to identify and resolve cross-program issues with non-NSS programs. • Risk: Critical operational capability, high unit costs, and low production rates drive the NSS community to be risk-adverse. Aerospace combines a systems engineering core competency with an experienced workforce. This combination is absolutely essential in evaluating risk and providing the appropriate, timely information in the government risk decision process. • Testing: Aerospace authored the military standard on space systems testing and is an integral part of the test planning and execution for NSS programs. Aerospace not only provides assessments of test program adequacy and in-plant monitoring of contractor test activities, but also has a world-class in-house laboratory capability, not available elsewhere in the contractor community, to conduct detailed failure investigations and independent testing. High Frontier 22
Page 1 and 2: INSIDE: Air Force Space Acquisitio
Page 3 and 4: Introduction General C. Robert Kehl
Page 5 and 6: Operationally Responsive Space In a
Page 7 and 8: From a technical perspective, the n
Page 9 and 10: per CJCSI 3170.01, is no more than
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Page 15 and 16: years late to need). It was also on
Page 17 and 18: ooks, guides, and deliverable data.
Page 21: By relentlessly pursuing continuous
Page 25 and 26: Figure 2. Template knowledge points
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Page 43 and 44: A Brief Example of the Value-Centri
Page 45 and 46: Space Acquisition The Cyberspace-De
Page 47 and 48: These observations all involve the
Page 49 and 50: the same capabilities within a larg
Page 51 and 52: Space Acquisition Is Acquiring Spac
Page 53 and 54: • Give up on trying to get a good
Page 55 and 56: • Establish quality program basel
Page 57 and 58: Imagery Architecture (FIA) programs
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Page 67 and 68: Legislative Perspective Weapon Syst
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Page 71 and 72: Book Review Arms and Innovation: En

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