By Geoff Fein
Navy Secretary Donald Winter has signed off on an update to the service’s acquisition instructions, adding in the new gate review process as well as aligning them with the Pentagon’s regulation.
“It’s a combination of the DoD 5000 as it applies to the Department of the Navy (DoN) and the Joint Staff Instruction on the Joint Capability and Integration Documentation system that is in the Joint Staff instruction 3170,” a Navy official told Defense Daily in a recent interview. “That’s the document that describes the requirements process.”
The 195-page update to the Navy’s acquisition instruction was signed by Winter in November and was effective immediately, the official added.
What the Navy did was take Joint Staff instruction and the Department of Defense (DoD) 5000 regulation, which governs the major weapons system acquisition process, and put the two together in a single source of information for Navy program managers, the official said.
“What’s new about this version, it does incorporate the Secretary’s new acquisition governance process…that’s the gate review,” the official added.
The new acquisition effort had been referred to as the two pass six gate process. It is now known as the acquisition governance process, the official noted.
“That’s probably the most significant change that’s in this version,” he added. “The overall intent is to lay out a process for how we go about acquiring capability.”
Earlier this year, Winter put in place a new review process for all pre-Major Defense Acquisition Program (MDAP) programs, all MDAP Acquisition category I (ACAT I) programs, all pre-Major Automated Information System (MAIS) programs, all MAIS (ACAT I) programs and selected ACAT II programs (Defense Daily, April 17).
The memo, issued Feb. 26, 2008, “establishes a review process to improve governance and insight into the development, establishment, and execution of acquisition programs in the Navy. The goal is to ensure alignment between service-generated capability requirements and acquisition, as well as improving senior leadership decision-making through better understanding of risks and cost throughout a program’s entire development cycle.”
“This governance process…the significant change here…we now have the department leadership at very senior levels…the CNO, Commandant, ASN levels…collaborating in the decision making process,” the official said. “That’s what these gate reviews are all about.”
To date, the Navy has done 39 gate reviews, he added.
But even with 39 reviews run through the new process, the jury is still out on whether the process has streamlined acquisition, the official said.
“It has the potential to do so if it is done properly. Most program managers over the course of a 12-month period of performance of their program probably have to do three to four different briefings,” he explained. “Now we have put it into a single gate review where they can cover the whole program one time.”
Since implementing the new acquisition governance process, Winter has had his staff take an initial quick look to see how the effort is fairing, the official said. “We have made some improvements to the process as a result of it.”
“One of the things that we realized, there was no way we had the bandwidth in the leadership to do 100 of these every year. So we have started to look at possibly doing them as a portfolio…do all submarine programs at one gate review as opposed to doing individual gate reviews for each one of them,” the official said. “We are going to learn as we go along.”