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Posted Monday, December 10, 2007
“Hi, we’re from the Pentagon and we’re here to help.” In contrast to the sarcastic titters often heard in response to statements like this, AFIT’s School of Systems and Logistics welcomes our Air Staff and Secretariat sponsors’ “help” because of the sincerity we know is behind such statements. From 4-6 Dec, SAF/AQXD, AQXA, and the SAF/ACE offices reviewed the entire portfolio of acquisition PCE courses taught by AFIT/LS. HQ AFMC functionals and AF Space Command were also participants in the review.
The first day and a half were spent overviewing 19 live/classroom courses and an additional 38 online courses. The main topics of each course were presented and discussed, along with the past three years’ student demographics—enrollments and the top five MAJCOMs, ranks/grades, and AFSCs/job series. Through this overview and others like it, the AQ and MAJCOM staffs are able to gain the big picture of what is being taught to the acquisition workforce, and identify education gaps and redundancies. The review went extremely well, with many kudos from all attendees, and resulted in a few tweaks to Pentagon processes to make the LS curriculum even stronger.
The remaining day and a half were spent with the staffs diving deep into the curricula of LS’s FAM 103, IPM 301, and SYS 400 courses. FAM 103, the AF Fundamentals of Acquisition Management, is the initial skills course for all 61xx, 62xx, and 63xx officers, and GS-1101 Palace Acquire civilian interns. Their review, down to each individual Learning Objective, verified that LS is teaching the right material to these extremely junior members of the acquisition workforce. Recommendations were made to improve upon and possibly expand the use of case studies as a teaching tool, and possibly incorporate a capstone project to integrate all aspects of the 14-day course.
IPM 301, the Intermediate Project Management Skills course, will begin including in its curriculum a dynamic management simulation that has students manage the construction of a lunar module. As the students go through the course, they’ll develop cost estimates, schedules, risk management plans, and more, and measure and report their progress as the course progresses. The AQ and MAJCOM staffs were very supportive of and excited about the redesigned curriculum and the simulation, as it will provide a more interactive learning environment and will provide more application-level learning objectives to the students. They also liked the fact that the simulation portion of the course could also be offered as a separate workshop or class to more advanced project managers, and SAF/AQXD and HQ AFMC agreed to consider this possibility with AFIT/LS in the future.
The review of SYS 400, Current Topics in AF Acquisition and Sustainment, went similarly well. All participants agreed the course teaches exactly the right types of topics, and recommended the interactive, guest speaker-driven format be kept. Participants also recommended setting aside one offering per year targeted at more senior members (15+ years) of the acquisition workforce.
All in all, it was a good three days. Three days rife with “help”—the kind you like to get.