Perspectives

Multi-Class Operations to Power Intelligence Missions

Discover how to gain value from not-yet-cleared talent

To accelerate classified missions, the intelligence community (IC) needs greater access to talent with rare skills that are in high demand across the U.S. That’s why the IC is exploring novel ways to securely harness digital expertise in the marketplace—especially on contracted programs. The key is to give narrow software jobs on select programs to cutting-edge teams that are not yet cleared. These teams do discrete development tasks. They work in unclassified settings. The IC only tells them what they need to know. And they hand off work products to cleared teams who are read in. All this, in turn, enables the IC to deploy classified capabilities.

Creating this sort of hybrid workforce for multi-class operations yields many benefits for the IC. These include a larger workforce, more flexibility, more geographic distribution, greater ability to operate at scale, better resilience, and faster access to cutting-edge skills. What’s more, this model fits to a tee the post-pandemic world—where remote work reigns and job mobility is high.

Perspectives

A Hybrid Cleared Workforce for Intelligence Missions

See how intelligence agencies can benefit from a workforce using cleared and not-yet-cleared talent. Read More

Perspectives

Young workers often switch jobs before they can earn a high-level clearance—and that hurts staff pipelines. But the hybrid workforce model gives the IC access to rare talent on demand. With the right framework, IC organizations can identify the projects best suited for this model. They can address security concerns. They can find necessary unclassified facilities. And they can overcome cultural resistance and trust issues.

Booz Allen has supported dozens of these initiatives across the IC and the Department of Defense. Along the way, we’ve learned many lessons—and put them into action for clients. Our recent work includes large-scale development efforts that require skills not pervasive in the cleared community. Here are three examples:

Program A – We built a highly technical, hybrid cleared workforce. It provides advanced geospatial data processing, analytics, and modeling capabilities. The developer teams work in unclassified settings. Between 30% to 50% of staff aren’t yet cleared or hold a clearance below top secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI). Software built in the unclassified domain is then promoted and integrated into the classified environments. This model increased developer productivity by 20%, grew the available talent pool by 400%, and created a 22% savings over comparable fully cleared programs.
Program B – We created a hybrid cleared workforce. It provides a classified client’s mission with highly specialized technical support. As part of this effort, we created a program security plan. The plan showed levels of knowledge communicated to staff at various clearance levels supporting the work across domains. We delivered a not-yet-cleared and unwitting technical team that builds tools in multiple U.S. regions. The team developed technical capabilities using skills and development platforms not resident in the IC. This freed up classified workspace for other missions, cut developer costs by 20%, and more than doubled the talent pool.
Program C – We delivered enhancements to an agency’s applicant portal using lower cleared resources. Lower clearances let us hire and retain talented developers and more efficiently use all available cloud services on the low side. The unclassified capabilities and workforce flexibility let us staff scarce resources, accelerate prototyping and testing, and help the client achieve a major goal of reducing hiring processing time.

To create hybrid workforce initiatives like these that lead to positive outcomes, organizations need to overcome three big challenges. These are choosing promising work, defining the right model, and overcoming contractual limitations. Here’s a close look at the challenges and how we’ve helped clients surmount them—using multi-class operations.

Choosing Promising Work

Not all work is created equal. Picking the wrong scope for the hybrid model can limit its value, create risk, or even create more re-work than efficiencies. Hybrid efforts rely on clear work packages that can be communicated to the low side and discrete work products that can be easily moved back to the high side. We’ve developed a framework to identify the high-impact contract scope that can easily be packed for unclassified development and then flowed back up to classified operations. For example:

On Program A, our team pioneered a methodology that creates discrete sprints for developers to work on. We limited development to software systems where classified software updates had caught up to the latest unclassified systems to ensure compatibility. Each work package is clearly defined and fast enough to integrate with (and avoid delaying) classified agile activities.
On Program C, we identified work packages that required full cloud capabilities and/or faster prototyping and development time and translated them to unclassified requirements for unwitting staff to create. Some work packages remained applicant-facing on the low side, while others were migrated up by cleared staff.

Defining the Right Model

The IC has a very broad range of functional and operational areas. All these technical, analytical, and management areas include activities that use different skills, workflows, and systems. These variables determine whether areas are promising candidates for the hybrid model. They also shape decisions about the kind of model needed to achieve the desired outcomes. This means determining how much (and which) work makes sense to do unclassified, how many staff to float between high and low, and what aspects of the model create the most value. For example:

On Program A, using not-yet-cleared staff grew our developer pool and created cost savings, but not greater efficiency or productivity. When we identified the developers with the most severable (can be cleanly separated) and compact (fast-turn) work packages and moved them to an agile remote-work posture, developer productivity rose by 20%. Working remotely, developers were able to find more productive work cadences.
On Program B, our program security plan showed levels of classified knowledge needed to do different parts of the development workflow (requirements down and product up). We matched staff with the right skills and clearances to those workflow steps. And we provided guidance on how to translate between workflow steps and classification levels. This clarified our requirements-definition process and identified what roles operated between classified and unclassified, when, and how.

Overcoming Contract Limitations

Nearly all IC contracts have clauses that define clearance levels and/or the need to work onsite. This standard language prevents hybrid workforce opportunities from the start. We have worked with clients to modify clauses to safely enable clearance and location flexibility. For example:

On Program A, we proposed contract language that allowed remote work from contractor sites, stipulated requirements for background checks on not-yet-cleared staff, and focused cleared staff on the unclassified to classified transfer to ensure work products were compatible with classified systems once moved up.
On Program B, we proposed language to create staff flexibility on contract, including defining the range of contractor staff that requires staff-like clearances and limiting what lesser cleared staff could have access to.

The IC has only just begun to reap the benefits of hybrid workforce initiatives—or multi-class operations. As these examples show, the three big challenges are, in fact, huge opportunities.

Picking the right work helps maximize the value of hybrid operations with workforce access, savings, productivity, and/or resilience. Defining the right model helps reduce risk by creating the right combination of staff, organization, location, technology, and operational workflows. And overcoming contract challenges enables effective operations in unclassified environments.

Every hybrid workforce initiative will include unique solutions. Leveraging lessons learned, leading practices, and proven tools and frameworks is the first step to success.