Program Design and Facilitation-Defense Acquisition University

The challenge:
Each year, the Defense Acquisition University at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, conducts a two-day forum for 60-70 Program Managers from all the services – the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Special Operations as well as the Missile Defense Agency – to come together to share their learning from the most recent implementations of acquisitions best practice, and to offer their recommendations for improving the current system or proposed systems.  The PMs lead projects as diverse as small arms and stores purchases to multi billion dollar systems such as the joint strike fighters, armored vehicles, aircraft carriers and submarines.

What we did: 
In  2011 and 2012 we helped the Program Managers faculty at DAU responsible for organizing the event, to design a new approach. Rather than generate a large number of ideas and assign priorities, they chose to ask participants  to synthesis key themes from the of many viewpoints, to reach a broad consensus on what works well, does, not or could be improved. This work led to the development of Maverick & Boutique’s Dynamic SWOT, which looks at organization strategy as a movie being made, rather than snapshot taken in time. We continue to work with DAU, proving mentoring support to their staff for their own strategic planning, mission outreach and leadership course design and delivery.