Welcome to the Air Force Institute of Technology

The Air Force Fundamentals of Acquisition Management Course (AFFAM) is a required initial skills course for most Air Force scientists (61XX officers), and all Air Force engineers (62XX officers) and program managers (63XX officers and 1101 civilians). AFIT’s School of Systems and Logistics has provided this course since January 2004 to 500-900 students a year. AFFAM is three weeks long, and all classes are held at in classrooms in Kettering, Ohio.

In December 2008, the faculty team responsible for AFFAM met to discuss the current status of the course and to plan improvements. The Department of Defense had released the newest version of DoD Instruction 5000.02, the primary DoD guidance for all significant DoD acquisition programs, and the Air Force primary program management implementing guidance (AFI 63-101) was being revised for a new release in early 2009. In addition to updating the course to reflect the new guidance, the faculty also wanted to dramatically enhance the students’ learning experiences by reducing lecture and providing more hands-on exercises. The team also wanted to provide a useful reference resource that would go with students to their first acquisition jobs and help them in the performance of their duties. It was also necessary to provide students with some information in forms other than lecture, to free up class time for more interaction and exercises.

With these goals in mind, the team undertook a six-month journey to revise AFFAM. The team overhauled the course content to reflect the most current DoD and Air Force acquisition guidance. Leveraging the subject matter expertise of many LS faculty members, the team created a 500-page textbook to serve as study materials and a student reference. The textbook will allow classroom lesson presentations to be shortened and modified to allow for more group exercises during the course. A systems engineering tower building exercise was added to reinforce and demonstrate the impact of user requirements and priorities on the systems design process in a development project. But the major addition to the course was a comprehensive, detailed acquisition strategy exercise that integrates all major aspects of a defense acquisition program (program management, systems engineering, acquisition logistics and support, contracting, cost estimating and budgeting, etc.). Teams of 5-8 students will develop and prepare an acquisition strategy based on a fictitious Tactical Laser System development called TLAS. The groups’ work will span the entire three weeks of the course, culminating in an acquisition strategy presentation to a faculty Acquisition Strategy Panel (ASP) in the final week. In all, approximately 24 hours of group exercises and applications have been added to the course, with no impact to overall course length and minimal changes to course lesson objectives.

The course sponsor (SAF/AQXD) is on board with all of the course improvements. A volunteer group of former AFFAM students from the Wright-Patt area helped beta test the acquisition strategy exercise in May, and the entire course was presented for the first time at the AFFAM class offering that began on 13 July 2009.