Agile Acquisition to Accelerate U.S. Army Missions

A New Definition of Acquisition Agility

Army leaders have put a firm stake in the ground to upend old acquisition practices: Where they used to issue prescriptive capacity requirements, they're now increasingly providing “characteristics of need.” In more cases, they're engaging industry around the mission challenge and their desired outcomes—and are intentionally leaving white space for innovation along the way.

Buying outcomes is not a new concept for the Army, and organizations are already making steady progress to challenge legacy acquisition models and vehicles. But now, there’s an opportunity to advance this concept past a set of practices: Agile acquisition at its core is an outcomes-based philosophy, no matter the contours of a specific contract.

While capacity will continue to play an important role within contracts, capacity alone cannot quantify a partner’s performance in product innovation and delivery or translate into benefits for an end user.

Fundamentally, acquisition agility is defined by an organization’s ability to:

  • Deploy solutions continuously and rapidly, by releasing product innovation from long-phased, rigid delivery patterns.
  • Adapt seamlessly to future requirements, by holding industry partners accountable for incremental progress toward modular, scalable solutions.

When agility is embedded into acquisition, it opens the door to rapid, iterative, and continuous software innovation. 

Features of Next-Generation Agility: Incremental, Modular Delivery Requirements

In the world of outcomes-based delivery, gone are the days of long-horizon development with an eye on the perfect final product. In fact, gone are the days when delivery teams can even consider their work “done” in the monolithic sense. Within an agile contract, the goalposts are mutually negotiated to be fluid—enabling critical outcomes and priorities to shift so a delivery team can continually generate end-user value within evolving mission conditions.

In many ways, this fundamental change in approach can be unsettling for those tasked with delivery. Recently, Danielle Moyer, executive director of Army Contracting Command, shared an important sentiment behind the rapid changes to acquisition: “We never want to enter a fair fight. We always want to have the advantage. Change is never easy but understanding and believing in the ‘why’ makes it all worth it.”

It’s true—upending the acquisition model is not always clear-cut for industry, from navigating objectives-based requirements to evolving performance incentives to addressing technical challenges that raise the bar and put the emphasis on delivering outcomes. But to fully support the defense mission at this critical moment, it’s important to remain focused on the “why” behind the Army’s momentum in embracing acquisition agility as a key enabler of mission agility.

Government and industry partners have already come a long way to dispel misconceptions around agile acquisition. For example:

  • Agile acquisition doesn’t work for large programs.”

                    (It certainly does.)

  • “It’s harder and more time-consuming for the government to manage agile contracts.” 

                    (Agile contracts are managed differently, but they are not harder to manage.)

  • “One contract type works better than others for agile delivery.” 

                    (Acquisition agility is more about embedding flexibility and outcomes into performance than about the specific contract type.)

So, where do we go from here?

From our experience, here are a few key considerations to help stakeholders embrace an agile philosophy as an end-to-end feature in acquisition—from the indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) level to task orders and across the duration of a multiyear program.

1. Product development and innovation can unleash program managers and contractors from rigid delivery patterns.

Agile software acquisition is certainly about speed to deployment, but it’s in equal parts about achieving rapid, incremental progress and innovation every step of the way.

 

The Army and its industry partners are long acquainted with the idea of “failing fast” and creating opportunities to prototype and test minimum viable products within safe, controlled environments. As traditional delivery expectations make way for new models, contracts can also increasingly leverage a product approach to software acquisition. That means grouping delivery requirements into product lines, which can be separated into individual products and then features—elements that program managers and individual product owners can oversee within a project portfolio.

 

This nested approach shifts the focus from delivery speed to end-user value. A product mindset unleashes program managers from long-phased, rigid delivery patterns, allowing them to focus on continuous, incremental progress for product innovation and maintain modularity within the products. And for industry, a product line approach to contracts allows contractors to increase efficiency, scale, and value in delivery. They can shift and scale resources across and within product lines, continually measure success against product line progress, and isolate challenges while limiting impact to progress in other areas. 

2. Modularity and flexibility—not just speed to delivery—should be embedded into contract requirements.

Outcomes-based software acquisition for the Army requires more than a technical process: It demands a culture of persistent adaptability across the acquisition lifecycle.

 

For years, modern engineering practices, such as ­DevSecOps, have accelerated speed to delivery and are now staples of software delivery requirements. Going forward, true agility will mean specific requirements for interoperability, modularity, and scale so that the Army isn’t weighed down by solutions that may lose value (and create risk) over time.

 

In our first article, we went into detail about the urgency of software agility to maintain mission flexibility—and acquisition is one of the most effective levers to pull to change the culture around software design. With technical flexibility embedded in contracts, industry can be accountable to design plug-and-play components, build APIs that are industry standard (and, in some cases, government-owned), ensure open and reusable data, and deliver solutions that can be rapidly switched in and out.

Of course, agile acquisition and delivery require different-in-kind measures of accountability that incentivize a culture of iterative progress—and tie dollars to mission outcomes. By folding term incentives into small increments, government contracts can accelerate commercial investments and ensure contractors are accountable to measure value and end-user feedback from the start.

We believe shorter cycles of measurement are particularly effective for buying software solutions, as the government can then deploy a software module and allow time for stakeholder buy-in and feedback before committing to subsequent modules. With the introduction of these market-like performance incentives, the government can also award subsequent option periods or the next increment to the most successful delivery partner. 

Beyond the performance incentives for industry, acquisition agility pushes collaboration to new heights. It marks the difference between ecosystem partners playing it safe on the sidelines—or sitting at the table with government, owning the path to progress. 

Looking Forward: Navigating the Road from Capacity to Continuous Outcomes

It’s hard to disrupt decades of entrenched acquisition practices to change the way things have always been done. But in significant ways, the legacy acquisition approach—and the mindset around contracting in the Army—has already changed.

The next chapter of agile acquisition will put the spotlight on:

  • Steady, incremental progress for product innovation and scale
  • Persistent adaptability across the software delivery lifecycle—no matter the contract type
  • Performance incentives that drive continuous industry investment in end-user value

This journey toward continuous, performance-based acquisition will most certainly up the ante for contractors. But while the stakes are higher, it’s fundamentally a win. Beyond the performance incentives for industry, acquisition agility pushes collaboration to new heights. It marks the difference between ecosystem partners playing it safe on the sidelines—or sitting at the table with government, owning the path to progress.