The term "smarter buyer" has entered the lexicon of the government space workforce, thanks in part to Aerospace's popular Smarter Buyer course, which has been given more than 40 times to more than 1200 government program managers and their staff since 2004. The one-day class is designed to help participants perform four specific functions:
Smarter Buyer provides insight into what motivates a contractor to work in the space business and investigates ways to create mutually beneficial plans for success. For example, although government and industry partner to ensure mission success, industry has the added goal of making the best use of resources to maximize corporate earnings and shareholder value. At times, this need for financial performance conflicts with the need to ensure mission success. This is the case, for instance, when contractors "bid to win." This contract capture strategy takes a very lean approach to staffing and accomplishing tasks and relies on a success-oriented approach without much risk reserve. Bidding to win to preserve strategic and financial targets may impede mission assurance activities because it limits contingency responses when risks are realized.
The success of the first Smarter Buyer course, focused on industry perspectives, spawned the concept for a series of related courses for government acquisition personnel. For example, the Smarter Buyer 2 class will focus on program executability. In particular, it will examine ways to establish program performance expectations that support both the acquisition baseline and the need to ensure mission success. It will emphasize the importance of program executability assessment points—a fundamental principle that considers mission assurance as a set of activities and assessments that are applied across the life cycle of a program, not just during the prelaunch verification.
Other Smarter Buyer courses are on the drawing board. Smarter Buyer 3, focusing on mission assurance, is planned for 2008. This one-day course will explain how to organize the government team, levy contractor work, and integrate results to prioritize mission success throughout the program life cycle. Smarter Buyer 4, on software-intensive systems, is also planned for release next year.
The educational design team is also considering a course on parts, materials, and processes along with a Smarter Seller course to round out the curriculum.
—Al Hoheb, Principal Engineer