Wartime Acquisition Sustainment Support Plan (WASSP)
DEFENSE STRATEGY | ENTERPRISE DESIGN | INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT
The WASSP effort centered around a wartime playbook, an effort which I led. The WASSP Playbook is an interactive document to help for DoD officials make more informed decisions to support the fleet during wartime, and help shift the acquisitions leadership culture to a preventative, rather than reactive, mindset.
Please note the work you see in here is highly censored due to the nature of the project. If you’re interested in more specific questions regarding this project, please reach out any time.
OPPORTUNITY
While I knew we needed strategies for wartime, it was also clear through my research that the best way to practice readiness during wartime, was to be prepared well beforehand. While this is not a revolutionary concept, giving actionable recommendations and resources to organizations as complex as the Department of Defense is a momentous task, and it was the opportunity we decided to take.
OUTCOME
The central pillar to this work was the WASSP Playbook, a document that gives actionable steps and resources to DoD leadership allowing them to achieve wartime readiness and support the fleet. The playbook helps leadership to understand how they can set their organizations up for success while also providing guidance on how to write their own specific wartime plays.
To use a metaphor, we weren’t just helping Defense leadership put their puzzle pieces together, we were also helping them take an inventory of the puzzle pieces they had or were missing.
Research & Development: Table Top Exercises
There were several ways which the design for the WASSP Playbook came to be, the first of which is are through the WASSP Table Top Exercise (TTX) events these events were designed to gather both domestic and international defense leadership into one place and talk through challenges facing the acquisition communities at a global scale. These workshops and the findings from these workshops informed which challenges we needed to tackle in the WASSP Playbook in order to have a meaningful, positive, and lasting impact on wartime readiness.
Research & Development: InterviEWS AND WORKSHOPS
In addition to my participation in TTX events, I hosted a series of interviews to better understand acute findings and also led a series of small workshops to further develop the WASSP Playbook content. These were both in-person and remote working sessions aimed to hone in on the root cause of challenges brought forth in research, and later in the process served as a method for co-designing solutions with the client.
