A multimillion-dollar contract negotiation between the Air Force and a major developer had reached an impasse and the clock was ticking. A $2 million gap between the developer's bid and the Air Force's funding—funding that would disappear if the contract was not signed by the end of the budget cycle—blocked the deal. At stake was the Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS) that the Air Force needed to support Precision Guided Munitions (PGM) planning.

The Air Force asked MITRE to step in and help the participants move beyond the impasse to a successful conclusion. This required not just knowledge of the Air Force's requirements and the technology involved, but also expertise in analyzing complex data and contracts to get to the heart of the problem.

MITRE assigned Jim Watters to take on the challenge. Watters had been in the Air Force for 20 years, almost half of those as a navigator. After his service, Watters joined the Mission Planning Program Office at Hanscom Air Force Base as a support contractor. He spent five years there before joining MITRE in 2000 to work on information security, as well as on the mission planning program. This experience provided Watters with a unique vantage point that spanned both sides of the issue.

Mission Planning

JMPS is an important program that supports the critical function of PGMs. Better known as "smart bombs," PGMs permit military planners to accurately locate and destroy targets. In contrast to the carpet-bombing campaigns of WWII and Vietnam that left behind huge swaths of destruction, PGM tactics minimize collateral damage and lower casualties.

To plot a successful PGM attack, mission planners require a vast amount of data to pinpoint a target's location. This data must then be incorporated by the on-board aircraft flight planners into the flight plan. However, current on-board systems do not have the necessary computational power to do the job efficiently.

JMPS is designed to meet all the flight needs dictated by the mission plan. The system's PGM software automates mission planning tasks so crew members can concentrate their efforts on reaching the target unharmed, delivering the weapon optimally, and departing the target safely. Eventually, JMPS will replace the many different systems employed by the military services for their various models of aircraft. This will allow a level of interoperability that will make for efficient and seamless cross-service mission planning.

Impasse

In February 2003, the Air Force was preparing to develop the next release of the JMPS. However, crucial updates first needed to be made to the PGM software. These updates lay at the root of the deadlocked negotiations between the Air Force and the contractor. With the deadline looming, the Air Force faced the possibility of the project going unfunded.

The Air Force turned to MITRE for two reasons. First, we had long been a part of the effort to automate the labor-intensive process of aircraft mission planning, contributing not only our expertise in integration and interoperability, but our talents for streamlining technology and stretching budget dollars. Second, one of MITRE's roles is to be the objective voice in a program such as this, one that involves a government agency and an outside contractor.

To better understand the nature of the impasse, Watters met with the participants. He was able to look at the situation from a fresh point of view and thus picked up on items the other participants hadn’t seen. When negotiations appeared to be at a standstill, Watters uncovered decisive data as a result of his evaluation.

The Devil in the Details

As he prepared for the negotiations, Watters recalled that an Integrated Baseline Review (IBR) had been conducted at the contractor’s facility only a few months earlier. An IBR ensures that the requirements imposed by a government contract are understood by the contractor and that the contractor has designed a program that will accomplish the intent of the contract. IBR data includes complete details on the task definitions, task durations, skill requirements, and resource allocations employed by a contractor. Watters realized this data would be perfectly suited for evaluating the contractor’s proposal.

Comparing the IBR data to the data included in the contractor's bid, Watters found an unnoticed source for much of the excess $2 million. The contractor, under pressure by the approaching budget deadline to draft an offer quickly, had assigned costs to tasks and subtasks without realizing that these same tasks and subtasks were already being performed in other contracted efforts.

Links and Last Adjustments

But how best to guide the negotiators through the reams of IBR data to illustrate his discoveries? By embedding simple hyperlinks into his copy of the contractor's technical proposal, Watters was able in his presentation to jump instantly to the relevant sections in his research when a question or disagreement arose. This made it easier for everyone to quickly understand his approach.

When Watters' presentation brought the duplicated tasking to light, the gap in the negotiations closed quickly—perhaps too quickly. In an attempt to bridge the last differences, the contractor offered to reduce drastically the labor requirements of its system engineering and software development. Watters' own experience in these fields alerted him to the danger such a reduction could present to the integrity of the project. After Watters brought this to the attention of both parties, the labor requirements were raised to a more prudent level.

Sharing the Credit

The result of Watters' diligence and resourcefulness was a JMPS contract that met both the Air Force's budget and its schedule. Participants were quick to credit the value of Watters' broad experience, attention to detail, and expertise with complicated data in reaching the agreement. The lead government negotiator voiced the attendees' high regard when he proclaimed to Watters, "You've just set a new standard for negotiating!"

But even in the light of this high praise of his innovative efforts, Watters is reluctant to take personal credit. Much of the credit, he insists, belongs to the culture MITRE has cultivated. "Any number of companies can hire people with practical experience. MITRE makes sure to pair that practical experience with innovation. Like nowhere I have ever worked before, creativity is fostered, encouraged, and celebrated at MITRE."

—by Christopher Lockheardt

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