How defence projects can balance defining requirements with managing uncertainty

Building agility into the design process is critical to delivering defence projects on programme and budget

Lack of clearly defined requirements is often blamed for project issues in defence but that can mean delaying getting a project underway. According to Mott MacDonald technical director for nuclear: civil and defence, John Palmer, projects need to build in greater agility rather than rely on fully focusing on requirements.

When a defence project is delayed, has a cost overrun, needs rework or fails to deliver the expected capability for the client, it is easy to claim the work started before the requirements were fully understood. However, the reality is that the work often hasn’t been planned to manage uncertainty or to cope with evolving requirements – and this is particularly true for first-of-a-kind assets or those that need to endure for many decades.

Image credit: UK MOD

Many new assets are well understood and can be standardised and adapted where necessary to integrate with the local environment, so defining the requirements is straightforward. On the more complex ones, waiting to fully define the requirements means that the work may never get started which is incompatible with the defence sector’s strategic imperative to maintain capability.

The UK’s recently published Strategic Defence Review (SDR) puts the need to deliver rapidly into perspective as it sets out the need to be ready for war within five years, but the sector cannot be ready if it waits until everything is known and the requirements fully set out before getting started.

The type of project that needs to take a flexible approach include complex systems of systems which take many years to deliver and where technologies and standards will move on and threats may change during the delivery period. In such cases, waiting for requirements to evolve may not always reduce uncertainty. It is therefore important to not just capture the known requirements but anticipate emerging ones too and undertake informed analysis of the assumptions being made and risks being baked in.

Having this agility is critical not just at the handover stage but when thinking about the whole life of the asset too. Many of the facilities we deliver for the defence sector are critical national infrastructure that is likely to still be in use 60 or more years from now. Advances in technology means that they will become obsolete in time and need to be designed to adapt to future changes that we cannot fully comprehend today.

Having the right mindset and developing trust is critical to working in this way and Mott MacDonald has worked in partnership with clients to develop a risk-based approach to delivering and maintaining critical infrastructure to support that.

We grow teams that include those who have client-side experience of being responsible for maintaining the operational effectiveness, maintenance and regulatory compliance of critical infrastructure in the defence environment. Having lived through the client’s challenge, they often join Mott MacDonald to help overcome the issues they have experienced in the past and want to partner with the client to do that. I often refer to them as “solutioneers” rather than “engineers” as they bring new thinking, rather than just asking the client about their problems.

By bringing in people with real world learning from the use of existing assets, we can work with our clients to mature the Concept of Operations and Operational Concepts for future facilities informed by learning from experience. The designs can then be tested against future scenarios, or use cases, beyond the handover phase and this helps clients to visualise what will be handed over on completion of construction.

By taking a full life-cycle systems view, the potential impact of changes to requirements at any stage through the asset’s life can be tested, to allow our clients to quantify what level of agility is being retained in the design and risks understood and managed. This allows designs to advance and be progressively assured based on critical elements rather than waiting for all requirements to be fully matured.

By believing that defining the requirements is essential for mitigating the risk of projects being delayed, going over budget or needing rework, assets can be inflexible and design just focused on handover. If you can’t change, then it will be difficult to respond to future threat, so just using a defined requirements approach to meet the demands of the SDR might make the UK ready for defence and security threats in five years but what about those that come in 50 years?

It is not possible to have infinite flexibility so defence clients need to work with partners who can collaboratively agree credible scenarios to plan for and move away from thinking about capital expenditure to consider whole life cost and capability as being the critical factors. We can support the defence sector to do that and ensure facilities developed to meet the SDR will be fit for the real world mission, now and in the future.