Agile NEC research and development, a spiral approach

How can you stay in control when your short term needs swamp your long term interests? Increasingly, the Dutch Defence has to balance contradicting needs. On the one hand, ongoing operations require to field new capabilities as soon as possible, but on the other hand, new capabilities need to be tested and evaluated before fielding them. Furthermore, the increasing pace of changes arising from the operational context and NEC transformation will only make the contradiction stronger. This paper intends to strengthen operational agility by proposing the ACTIVE (Adaptive C4I Test and Interoperability Verification Environment) methodology. The ACTIVE methodology is a spiral approach to develop, test and field new network enabled capabilities. Spiral development is a well known systems engineering approach of repeated cycles of plan, do, check, and act. Each cycle rapidly implements an improved solution while the requirements and design are not fixed yet. This is exactly what makes for operational agility: rapidly fielding new capabilities and using operational feedback for the next improvement cycle. How can we ensure that each cycle is performed as quickly and efficiently as possible? Several key decisions allow doing just that. The ACTIVE methodology defines and details four types of projects (iteration levels) who together define a complete spiral comprising four cycles. Each type of project is explained in the context of NEC development.