To begin, I wanted to get a better idea of our tradespace. I reached out to the prime and our other projected bill own- ers and explained the situation. In my communications, I was very direct. I stressed the importance of transparency and celerity to establish a foundation for the harder discussions that would follow. I worked closely with my financial managers and contracting team, taking advantage of their insight and experience to ensure our tradespace was ac- curate, actionable, and legal. Ultimately, we compiled an itemized list totaling ~$120M [million] in planned expenses for FY20 across the program and established that EPAWSS would have about $75M in available funding resulting in a $45M deficit. With our tradespace established, the next step was to determine priorities. At this stage, it was essential to include members from each functional area within the Integrated Product Team (IPT) —Project Managers, Finance Managers, Contracts, Engineering, Test, and Logistics. There were ~40 line items that made up the $120M of projected expenses, each with its own story. We worked with the prime across all functional disciplines to get the stories in writing for those items related to the EMD contract. The prime also supported multiple meetings as we digested the options on the list and challenged assumptions. We also asked for their perspective regarding the priority for each item, and whether some options had dependencies on one another. We followed a similar approach for our next-largest bill owner, our test group at Eglin AFB. This back-and-forth was critical in determining the overarching priorities for the $75M. It made all parties part of the problem-solving process, rather than having a solution prescribed to them. Their buy-in was essential to starting and maintaining the new plan throughout FY20. Once the tradespace had reached a moderate level of maturity, we moved on to the decision-making process. We could not afford to wait until every detail had been determined. Just as it was important for the external parties to have buy-in with the new plan, it was even more important for the leaders across the IPT to have ownership of the decisions going forward. At that time, I was taking classes for my MS in Engineering Management through the University of Louisville and had just finished a class in Project Management in which we covered a unit on group decision-making. The pairwise ranking method was perfect for the scenario we found ourselves in (see Figure 2 and Figure 3 below for an example). This method involves ranking a list of items by Figure 2. Sample Pairwise Ranking Matrix Tool (Completed Input Phase)
Source: Author
DEFENSE ACQUISITION | May-June 2025
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