I. Program Overview Organization Name/Program Name: Program Leader Name/ Position/Contact information E-mail, Phone Federal Aviation Administration Automated Flight Service Stations (AFSS) James (Jim) Derr, Director, Aviation Services Phone Number: (240) 888-4457 Email: James.Derr@lmco.com Postage Address: 9231 Corporate Blvd Rockville, MD 20850 Program Category o System level Sustainment Program Background: What is this program all about? (No more than one page). Describe: The overarching need for this program History of the program The product that is created by this program Scope of work original & updated Expected deliverables Current status of the program II. VALUE CREATION = 20 POINTS The Automated Flight Service Station (AFSS) program provides safety-critical services to the general aviation pilot community within the continental United States, Hawaii and Puerto Rico on behalf of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). These services include pre-flight weather briefings, inflight emergency support, Search and Rescue initiation, and many other features. A team of 800 personnel handles more than 200,000 pre-flight calls from pilots each month and provides around the clock service 365 days a year. The program plays a key role in ensuring the safety of the nation s airspace for all aviation stakeholders. The FAA awarded Lockheed Martin (LM) the AFSS contract in 2005 with a challenge to enhance general aviation safety and realize cost savings by applying industry best practices to program operations, technology and customer service. AFSS has achieved its cost-control and quality enhancement goals by establishing close relationships with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Union; through demand-based staffing and scheduling; by focusing on weather briefer training; by embedding automation into workflows; and by introducing Web-based pilot services. Safety has been enhanced by the introduction of several novel capabilities not previously available to general aviation. The $2 billion program has consistently met or exceeded all performance objectives set by the customer. For the past 2.5 years, the program has posted 100 percent achievement of customerdefined acceptable performance levels, The customer exercised a two-year option in 2013. Value: What is the value, competitive positioning, advantage, and return created by this program to your: Customers National Value: Through innovative management and mission dedication, the program has realized exceptional technical and financial results, helping to deliver a safe and efficient airspace for the nation and the general aviation community. The program has enhanced air safety in many ways. Safety is improved when pilots receive briefings, and pilots are more 2014 AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 1
interests, war fighter Company Strength, bottom line, and shareholders Scientific/technical value (particularly for R&D programs) Excellence and Uniqueness: What makes this program unique? Why should this program be awarded the Program Excellence Award? likely to obtain a briefing when quick access is provided to FAAcertified weather briefers. AFSS has achieved an average of 7 seconds to answer calls against a requirement of 30 seconds, with a smaller workforce. The program maintains a full-time customer service and quality assurance team that ensures briefing standards are met. Ongoing general aviation community outreach is used to inform pilots of safety best practices and new services. Beyond these traditional functions, AFSS has introduced several new safety capabilities not available elsewhere. These capabilities include a new paradigm for online briefing presentation that makes traditional text-intensive briefings much easier to understand; an alerting service that lets pilots know when new or modified safety critical conditions arise; and the use of surveillance information to improve the speed and accuracy of search and rescue procedures. Internal R&D funding was used to develop all of these capabilities. Under Lockheed Martin management, AFSS has realized more than $1.5 billion in savings and is on track to save $2 billion over the life of the program, enabling the FAA customer to fund additional initiatives in a financially constrained environment. The current and projected program savings were driven primarily by consolidating 58 flight service stations into 5, implementing an event driven staffing model vs peak load, consistently improving performance against Acceptable Performance Levels and attaining higher customer satisfaction ratings through the use of automation and enhanced services. AFSS provides access to its new safety features, along with engineering support, to commercial aviation application developers outside of the program. This enables pilots using other flight-planning tools to benefit from Lockheed Martindeveloped technologies. Excellence and Uniqueness: The excellence and uniqueness of the AFSS program is reflected in both the sustained program performance and the advancement of a new vision for the delivery of general aviation flight services that is safer, more efficient and more cost-effective. The unique structure of the AFSS contract allowed Lockheed Martin to innovate and introduce new safety-oriented capabilities at no additional cost to the FAA and at a much faster pace than is achievable in typical system development procurements. For example, Lockheed Martin developed the adverse condition alerting service (a substantial application) under Internal R&D funding, demonstrated it to the FAA in January of 2012, and deployed it in October of 2012. Progressing from research concept to operational capability in an FAA system in under a year is a significant and rare achievement. The uniqueness of the Lockheed Martin-FAA partnership is 2014 AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 2
further evident in the fact that the FAA has entrusted the AFSS team with being the only non-government entity permitted to perform air traffic interaction with pilots, including making no-fly recommendations. III. ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESSES/BEST PRACTICES: (HOW DO YOU DO THINGS) = 30 POINTS Strategic: Affordability Management Describe how your program has addressed affordability from a solution, operational, business process, sustainment, strategic or other perspective. Strategic: Opportunity Management - Describe how your program has identified its operational and business opportunity, and manages this opportunity throughout the program s life cycle. Strategic: Strategic Supply Chain Integration and Cost Effectiveness Management: - Describe how your program is integrating its supply chain to assure visibility and adapting long-term cost effectiveness up and down the supply chain. Over the program s lifespan, the AFSS team has consolidated 58 facilities into five and reduced the weather briefer workforce to 500 from the previous 2,000, which has saved the FAA over $1.5 billion to date in operating expenses. Management has established an open and honest relationship with the IAM union and implemented a demand-based staffing and scheduling system based on algorithms developed through analysis of historical and on-going usage data. In addition, the introduction of Web-based services and work-flow automation has reduced the workload on flight service specialists. Continuous process improvement provides for on-going rigorous assessment of costs. Early in the proposal process, the program team identified opportunities to reduce the most significant program costs. With sufficient investment in automation and consolidation, the team saw a major opportunity to reduce program costs while at the same time enhancing safety and the quality of the information and services provided to pilots. Although the program contract did not require the development of Web-based pilot services, the team developed a suite of online services, at no additional expense to the FAA or pilots, which has contributed significantly to the mission. The AFSS program benefits from the cost efficiencies realized through the Lockheed Martin supply chain. As the program has entered a cycle of hardware and software technology refresh, the team has utilized the Lockheed Martin Global Supply Chain Operations (GSCO) team to cost-effectively service and replace systems that are nearing the end of their lifecycle. The GSCO team frequently communicates ideas and suggestions to the program team for reducing supply chain costs. For example, one recent cost-saving suggestion involved contracting with a different vendor for training tools. All suggestions brought to the program through the GSCO team are evaluated for appropriateness to the program and either adopted, rejected, or adopted with modifications. Strategic: Operational Integration and Systems Engineering The AFSS Flight Services for the 21 st Century system (FS21) comprises a geographically distributed operational system 2014 AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 3
Describe the challenges faced by your program in terms of integrating the system into its operational environment and its impact on systems engineering planning and management. Operational: Planning, Monitoring, and Controlling - Describe your planning and resource allocation processes. How do you monitor and review your program s progress and make corrections to keep the program on track? How have you worked with your customer to assure quality and communication without creating non-value reviews and audits that do not fit your program effort? Operational: Supply Chain and Logistics Management -- What processes, tools and supported by a wide-area network that enables data communications among the multiple FS21 facilities. AFSS is critical to the safety of the National Airspace System, so it must be fully operational around the clock, 365 days a year. At the same time, the team must perform several levels of upgrades, including potentially daily time-critical fixes (e.g., security patches), 56-day adaptation data changes, and twice-a-year large-scale builds typically ranging from 10,000 to 25,000 lines of code. These events are all accomplished while the system remains live. The FS21 Technology and Support Laboratory supports these events and maintains the system through a production configuration that mimics a full data center and a test and development area that provides smaller configurations. The laboratory constructs a variety of test configurations, ranging from low-level subsystems to a full dual data center, by combining and reconfiguring the resources from the production and test and development portions of the laboratory. As part of our agile development process, planning and monitoring are performed at the team level by each team. All teams utilize the VersionOne lifecycle management tool. VersionOne is an all-in-one agile project management tool built from the ground up to support agile software development methodologies. Product planning, release planning, sprint planning, review, reporting and analysis are all performed within the tool. Each team s progress is monitored on a daily basis and the team is responsible for meeting their commitments. Each team member must enter their daily progress into VersionOne and the progress is tracked by the management team. The management team reviews the release progress in bi-weekly Critical Thread Review (CTR) meetings. Release progress metrics including Earned Value Management (EVM) have been configured in VersionOne and are reviewed at each CTR. At the frontline level, engineers and operators meet once a week to engage in a free-ranging, person-to-person dialogue about new or ongoing issues and concerns. Information from these meetings is then rolled up into monthly program management and financial reviews with the customer. Additional customer communications take place as necessary in person or by telephone. A high degree of transparency between the program team and the customer reinforces the customer s trust that all relevant issues are being disclosed a timely manner. This trust ensures that program reviews are limited to those that are necessary and productive. In addition to having onsite support from the Lockheed Martin GSCO team, the AFSS program s subcontracting success may be largely attributed to a customer-centered 2014 AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 4
relationship-building methods have you used to develop, refine and improve supply chain and stakeholder integration? Please indicate methods used to analyze/factfind regarding supplier proposals. This is one of the most critical needs of our industry please provide specific details and data that assisted you in gauging the effectiveness. Operational: System Integration, Testing & Reviews - Describe the activities and processes used to succeed in your system integration, and testing. How did you conduct system design and technical reviews? What innovations in processes or tools were used to further evolve this capability? Operational: Risk/Issue/ Opportunity Management - Describe the processes used to identify both risks and opportunity and to assure potential for both is addressed effectively. Please subcontract/purchase order execution and strategy that focuses on; affordability, performance and compliance. The AFSS subcontractor team was structured following the LM Subcontracts Management Procedures and LM Acquisition Procedures (LMAP). The latter is a comprehensive set of procedures used by the GSCO team that conform to the FAR and Lockheed Martin s corporate policy statements. A step-by-step selection process was then established and followed to identify, screen, select, and pre-qualify subcontractors to fill needed skills and product requirements. Once vendor proposals were received, they were evaluated based on the best value to Lockheed Martin and ultimately the FAA. As part of the normal AFSS business rhythms, the GSCO team meets with the program teams weekly to review the status of subcontracted services which are maintained as part of the Purchase Tracking Database. The GSCO team meets monthly with the program manager to provide status on predictive sales used for financial forecasting, net open commitments, funding status, payment status, cost savings, supplier diversity, risks and opportunities and upcoming audit status. The GSCO team also has established regular business rhythms with each of the major subcontractors to review their adherence to plans, schedules, and budgetary constraints. Controls are established to give required visibility for successful subcontractor performance. The system and requirements were verified during system acceptance testing performed in 2006 with the FAA customer present. Test cases with success criteria were generated to test each use case and all of the derived requirements. All Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT) and Site Acceptance Testing (SAT) was completed in February 2007. Interface Control Documents (ICDs) were reviewed with the customer prior to being baselined. Changes to ICDs are reviewed by the customer and require an FAA National Airspace System change proposal and safety risk management assessment. The program adheres to measurement and collection of metrics described in the AFSS Quantitative Management Quality Process (QMQP). The process for change requests includes all program organizations to ensure change impacts are fully assessed and documented. The AFSS Risk & Opportunity Management (ROM) process includes five phases: planning, identifying, assessing, handling, and monitoring and reporting. The process is governed by a ROM plan that outlines the program strategy and process for handling risks and opportunities; the key roles and stakeholders; the tools and training required for success; and the business 2014 AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 5
indicate any forward-leaning processes to support. Team Leadership: Team Culture and Motivation - Describe how you created your team spirit and culture, and accomplished entire team integration and individual team member motivation. Given the economic environment and changes in the global marketplace, how did you assure your team changed swiftly and with agility? Team Leadership: Lessons Learned and Knowledge Management - Describe how you collect lessons learned and best rhythm by which the process is managed. Once the plan has been established, program members identify risk and opportunities through brainstorming sessions, taxonomies and lessons-learned activities. Once a risk or opportunity has been identified, it is documented in the AFSS program ROM register. During the assessment phase, the probability and the potential impact of risks and opportunities are evaluated and prioritized based on the composite risk assessment. It includes variables such as programmatic, technical, schedule, and cost consequence definitions. After being assessed, each new risk or opportunity is assigned an owner who is responsible for selecting a handling strategy and developing an action plan. Risk owners are required to provide status of handling actions at the monthly ROM business review, which includes updates to start and completion dates of activities, the effect of completed actions on probability, and any impacts to assessed risk and opportunity levels. The results of the monthly reviews are communicated to company leadership and the cost impacts are analyzed in conjunction with the AFSS cost review. Once a risk has been sufficiently mitigated or an opportunity fully realized, success is communicated and the item is closed by the AFSS program ROM board. Many members of the current AFSS team transitioned from government to contractor employees, which presented a variety of cultural challenges. When Jim Derr became program manager in 2009, he immediately identified improving employee morale as a program priority and embarked on an effort to meet personally with employees at all AFSS sites. Open, no-risk forums were held across the program to listen to employee concerns and gather actions. The program manager has continued to visit all sites at least once a year. In addition, twice-a-year meetings are held with union representatives to bring them up to date on the current status of the program and its future direction. Honest communication has been the key to establishing a culture of trust and employee engagement. AFSS employees understand the critical importance of their work and that the FAA s satisfaction with the team is based on its record of outstanding performance. Employees of the month are chosen at each site and special events are held to strengthen the culture and camaraderie both within the employee ranks and with management. Most of the ideas that improve the AFSS program (best practices) come from frontline employees. They arise organically in a variety of ways, ranging from direct suggestions to the program manager during all-hands site meetings to discussions 2014 AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 6
practices, and how they are shared with your team and company to improve performance. Also how are you capturing expertise and knowledge to assure availability over the life of the program? Team Leadership: Leadership Development - How do you develop your team s skills and prepare/ develop future leaders? Best (& Next) Practices: Identify your program s specific Best Practices that you believe are unique, and could be shared with others and become industry s Next Practices. during weekly meetings of operators and engineers. The program management team is energized toward implementing ideas quickly and learning as much from those that are not successful as from those that are. Lessons learned are shared regularly at operational and strategic meetings. The team s approach to leadership development includes an active mentoring program for employees at all levels of the organization. This helps build the pipeline of individuals who are qualified to step into higher-level positions as needed. In addition, our succession planning process involves not just identifying candidates but actively preparing them for new roles. The program management team strongly encourages information sharing and distribution of knowledge and decision-making in support of program continuity. The program is implementing a next-generation vision for a more-commercialized model for the future of flight services. The model features collaboration with third-party vendors, allowing AFSS-developed Web-based tools and services to be incorporated into commercially available pilot service products, at no additional cost either to the FAA or to the vendors. This unique approach to sharing flight services tools is facilitated by the AFSS program s ability to provide a bridge to the commercial side of the industry from the closely guarded and highly secure National Airspace System. IV. ADAPTING TO INNOVATION AND COMPLEXITY: (HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH YOUR PROGRAM S UNIQUE COMPLEXITIES) = 20 POINTS Identify the Program s Market Uncertainty level How new is your product to your market and users, based on the definitions below. Then describe how you deal and address this specific uncertainty: - Derivative an improvement of an existing product/system. - Platform a new generation in an existing product line. - New to the Market a product or system adopted from another market - New to the World - breakthrough product, never seen before The AFSS program has characteristics of both a derivative and a new platform system. Human-in-the-loop flight services for pilots is a mature model. The objective of the AFSS program has been to provide these services more efficiently and cost effectively while enhancing safety. This has been accomplished through both new technologies and management best practices. At the same time, the program has recognized that a new generation of pilots is more familiar with and often prefers online services accessible through computers and smart devices. This evolving characteristic of the flight services consumer led the AFSS program to introduce an entirely new platform: a suite of Web-based services that meet the needs and preferences of modern users. The new platform has driven an increase in usage among pilots while lowering costs and providing flight services personnel with more time to deliver high-quality briefings. 2014 AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 7
Identify the Program s Technological Uncertainty using the definitions below. Then describe how you deal and address this uncertainty: - Low-tech: application of mature, well-established technology - Medium Technology: existing technology modified to meet new design requirements - High-Technology: recently developed new technology - Super High- Technology: nonexisting technology that needs to be developed during the program. Identify the level of your System Complexity using the definitions below. Then explain how you are dealing with this level of complexity: - An Assembly performing a single function. - A Sub-system fitting within a larger system. - A System a collection of subsystems performing multiple functions. - An Array a System of Systems ; a widely dispersed collection of systems serving a common mission. Identify the Pace and Urgency of your team s effort using the definitions below. Then describe how you deal with the Most of the AFSS program technology challenges fall into the high technology category. AFSS has selected the agile methodology as its primary software development approach for the program. Because the AFSS program is significantly more complex than traditional small agile projects, the team has chosen to leverage Leffingwell s Scaled Agile Framework, which uses industry data to support initial practices and continuous improvement. By leveraging a proven industry scaling framework, the program is able to take advantage of industry metrics, lessons learned and widely available training. The benefit to using the agile development approach has been twofold. The first is the programs ability to quickly deliver advanced function to the pilots in releases every 8 weeks vs the previously used waterfall methodology which delivered function semiannually. The reduced delivery schedule allows for a better feedback from pilots before the next function is released. The second significant benefit to agile development has been the reduced integration time with third party vendors. This relationship and collaboration assists in driving innovation to pilots faster on their preferred platform. AFSS is best described as a system. There are a number of systems which perform specific functions. These systems provide data via the database or communicate via the message broker component of the system which distributes data to each system as needed. These systems include flight planning, briefing, alerting, web site, web services, Active Call Director, Voice Communication System, Hazardous Inflight Weather Advisory Service and Telephone Information Briefing Service. From a centralized core system that has been in place for the nine years, the program has expanded into a Web-based operation that performs essentially the same function as the human-in-the-loop model but in a significantly different manner. Also adding to the system s complexity are the program s five operational sites, one support facility and one laboratory. The complexity is handled through strong program management oversight and a robust configuration management framework. AFSS uses an asset management database to track all assets and their properties, such as hardware-to-software mapping relationship, software versions, and network connectivity details. The program also maintains a set of baseline documents on a collaboration site. A strict change management process includes a Joint Engineering Review Board, a program Change Control Board. From an operations perspective, AFSS is a time-critical program. A failure to meet time-based requirements not only jeopardizes the financial health of the program, it also reduces safety for pilots. A failure to meet that requirement (or consistently exceed it 2014 AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 8
program s pace requirements: - Regular timing no specific time pressures. Fast/Competitive time to market is important for competitiveness. - Time Critical there is an absolute and criticalto-success deadline. - Blitz there is a crisis element driving the need for immediate response Other Complexities & Uncertainties - Describe other complexities and unknown factors faced by this program and how you addressed them. as we have) would result in fewer pilots receiving the safety-critical information they need to make flight decisions. Urgent Pilot Reports (PIREPs) are used to warn other pilots of hazardous conditions; a failure to process them quickly could mean another pilot does not receive the information in time to avoid the hazardous condition. Another example is search and rescue. It is critical to reach survivors of an accident quickly, to deal with injury or avoid prolonged exposure. The traditional search and rescue procedure was triggered by a flight being 30 minutes overdue at the destination airport. For a long flight with an accident occurring early in the flight, this could mean a delay of hours even to begin a search. By introducing surveillance data into the search and rescue environment, we are able to detect situations such as loss of aircraft movement much earlier and the search process is expedited by having a position history. We deal with the time critical operations pace in several ways, including demand-based staffing, training, ongoing monitoring and metrics analysis, automation aides to expedite specialists processes, and innovative new capabilities such as surveillance-enhanced search and rescue. As a key participant in the operation of National Airspace System, AFSS has a major responsibility to maintain robust security against cyber threats. To accomplish this, the program utilizes the Lockheed Martin intelligence-driven cyber security approach based on the corporation s Cyber Kill Chain. The program has access to the latest threat information and defense strategies developed through the Lockheed Martin NexGen Cyber Innovation & Technology Center and the Lockheed Martin Cyber Security Alliance. V. METRICS (HOW DO YOU MEASURE PROGRAM S PERFORMANCE) = 30 POINTS (Note: We are not looking for $ results, but the relative percentage achieved. In particular indicate what specific metrics and data you are using that drive the program beyond standard measures of schedule, budget, and performance, and which have contributed to your program s focus and its success.) Customer - How do you measure the impact of your program on your customer and your customer s satisfaction? Include a description of your metrics, as well as numerical evidence. Customer satisfaction is measured by the Customer Conformancy Index and a quarterly customer satisfaction survey. The survey of pilots is performed by a third-party company, and the AFSS contract requires the program to maintain 70 percent satisfaction scores. The Customer Conformancy Index is developed from results of the pilot survey. Pilot satisfaction remains high, which is evident by the most recent scores of 85 in 2013 and 83 in 2014. Previous quarterly survey scores have also been greater than 80. 2014 AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 9
Performance - How do you measure your program s performance in traditional terms such as schedule, budget, requirements, and business results? Preparing the Future - How do you measure and assess the long-term contribution of your program to the corporation/organization? Team - How do you measure and assess the impact of your program on your team development and employee satisfaction? Unique Metrics - Describe any unique metrics you are using to measure your program s progress and how do you focus it for outstanding success. Program performance is measured by 23 separate metrics. These metrics measure customer satisfaction, speed and accuracy of services, and service availability and are directly tied to financial incentives/credits and cost sharing. These performance-based mesurements along with LM s integrated management oversight of daily operations facilitates a proactive approach to problem identification and solutions, resulting in low risk to performance and high customer satisfaction. Over the past 2.5 years, the program has achieved 100 percent of its performance objectives including service availability greater than 99%, less than 3 operational errors per year, and flight plan accuracy greater than 94%.These metrics were achieved while providing more than 1.2 million flight plans to pilots, answering 500,000 radio contacts, filing more than 900,000 flight plans and initiating approximately 6,300 search and rescues in 2013. In addition, the FAA customer utilizes 115 discrete measurements to establish the program s cost-share metric, which have yielded 2 consecutive years of program underruns being shared between the FAA and LM. The AFSS program s Web-based flight services delivery model has positioned Lockheed Martin as a leader in designing and operating next-generation fight services systems. The pilot web portal s increasing utilization numbers have grown to over 14,000 users since its initial offering in November 2012 and show the promise of this approach for the future. Multiple 3 rd party application and hardware vendors have integrated through web services to capitalize on AFSS enhanced flight service offerings. Lockheed Martin conducts an annual survey of employees. Among AFSS employees, the survey has recorded a steady year-overyear increase in employee satisfaction. Another gauge of employee satisfaction is the program s engineer attrition rate, which is consistently very low. The program has engineering attrition of approximately 5 percent against an industry average of 7 percent. The AFSS program collects services measurements from our IT Service Desk. These service measurements are used to calibrate cost and technical performance models for program services. They also give Lockheed Martin the ability to compare and contrast service baselines with industry benchmarks. 2014 AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 10