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Parallel Development Can Be Useful in an Agile Acquisition Context but Is Not Always the Appropriate Approach

• Our review of historical program developments resulted in identifying five enablers of parallel development: effective assessment of technological risk and maturity; effective management of system integration risk; planned incremental approach to fielding capabilities; tight alignment of requirements, acquisition, and budget stakeholders; and strong contingency planning.
• The single most important issue for successful parallel development is performing and acting on an honest assessment of technological risk and maturity. This requires an independent, unbiased assessment of that risk, including system integration risk. Only technologies that are mature and well understood should be incorporated into the design of new systems.
• Parallel development is more successful when applied incrementally, focusing on introducing one major new subsystem at a time. A block upgrade strategy can enable this, focusing on an element of either a mission system or the platform, but not both in the same increment.
• While parallel development allows increased focus on a narrower set of issues, it also increases the importance and risk of system integration. Because the decoupled subsystems are designed and developed separately, integration risk may increase.
• Parallel development has the potential to reduce the time from technology development to the fielding of new capabilities, but it is not a panacea for the persistent acquisition challenges that affect complex system development. It must be carefully and wisely applied, and it may not always be an appropriate development approach.

In providing analytical support to the U.S. Air Force's Air Superiority 2030 Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team, RAND researchers explore how a parallel development approach in an agile acquisition environment can help more rapidly transition new technologies and concepts to the fleet. Parallel development is an approach that intentionally decouples the technological development and management of core elements of a weapon system — for example, decoupling the development of software architecture from applications that will run in that software environment. In this report, researchers identify five enablers of parallel development, and each enabler's underlying management actions, and draw lessons from ten historical development programs. The program review suggests that all five of the identified enablers must work together to successfully apply parallel development in an agile acquisition context. The framework presented is intended to be a first step in defining and understanding parallel development, and the authors offer next steps for further research.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Enablers of Parallel Development in an Agile Acquisition Environment

• Chapter Three

  Implementation Considerations

• Chapter Four

  Conclusions