By now you’ve heard Secretary Frank Kendall’s big announcement at the AFA Warfare Symposium last month in Colorado—sweeping changes are in store for the US Air Force and US Space Force in response to the deepening power competition with China. Optimizing the Nation’s Force structure to improve warfighting readiness is ... Read More

Organizing like products into portfolios is more than for convenience. Experts agree—the Project Management Institute (PMI) Program Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) states that centralized product management can bridge the gap between strategy and implementation, offering many quantifiable benefits. Specifically ... Read More

Appearing in the November 2023 issue of the National Contract Management Association (NCMA) Contract Management (CM) Magazine, Dayton Aerospace Vice President Tom Wells, CFCM, Fellow, discusses how market research empowers ... Read More

When government senior leaders are asked what skill is missing from the government workforce, you may be surprised at the response. The answer? Critical thinkers. In fact, at a recent Department of the Air Force Information Technology and Cyberpower (DAFITC) ... Read More

Financing and payment policies are viewed as a critical aspect to preserving the overall health of the defense industrial base and ensuring global competitiveness, but are the current policies effective in achieving these goals? In 2019, the General Accountability Office issued a report that noted the DOD last performed a ... Read More

Supervisors are responsible for developing teams through training. Its importance cannot be overstated—training provides intrinsic benefits to the individual, the team, and to the broader organization. Classically, training can be formal, where concepts and methods are presented in an academic environment, as well as less formal, such as on-the-job training ... Read More

Appearing in the November 2022 issue of the NCMA's CM Magazine, Dayton Aerospace vice president, Tom Wells, distinguishes between facts and judgements, and why that matters to your basis of estimate (BOE). Tom discusses ... Read More

DOD and Air Force leaders are unanimous that the United States must be able to deliver critical capabilities rapidly and at affordable costs to maintain deterrence in an era of intensifying great power competition. Unfortunately, past acquisition programs, and particularly aircraft development programs, have often failed to ... Read More

After 35-plus years in the US Air Force (USAF), Dayton Aerospace vice president and contracting expert, Tom Wells, has collected quite a few war stories and mentored dozens of young government buyers. In the May 2021 issue of NCMA’s CM Magazine, Tom shares 12 simple, yet detailed contract principles—many learned ... Read More

Determining a fair and reasonable price can be quite challenging. While there are rules governing the ultimate outcomes of the process, how you get there is more of an artform. In the November 2020 issue of NCMA's Contract Management magazine ... Read More

From the program manager to the program executive officer (PEO) to the Air Force depot complex commander, all stakeholders share a common imperative: Provide maximum warfighting capacity, capability, and readiness. In meeting that imperative, a primary analytic question is to determine whether sufficient depot capacity exists throughout the fleet’s lifecycle ... Read More

If effective fleet management is a complex exercise in managing competing priorities, then it is also an exercise in analytics—the scientific process of transforming data into insights for the purpose of making better decisions. A program manager’s challenge is finding the analytic “sweet spot” within analysis data requirements, complexity, flexibility, ... Read More

A consistent and deliberative decision-making process is as important as the outcome itself and is worthy of reflection. This is particularly true in today’s environment, where the quantity of information to consider and the pace and complexity of decisions are increasingly at odds ... Read More

Effectively managing a fleet is an exercise in managing competing priorities. Operators demand availability to meet mission and training requirements and capability necessary to maintain technological relevancy, ensure survivability, and achieve mission effectiveness. Juxtaposed with availability and capability demands is the demand for ... Read More

Can a recently growing defense budget or maintenance and supply chain initiatives such as CBM+ reverse the trend of lower mission capable rates ? It’s unclear— and that’s the point. Today’s product support managers (PSMs) must have decision-quality information to know the net result of strategies chosen. Until then, a ... Read More

As CBM+ continues to gain traction in the USAF, it’s important for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), software developers and other industry partners to understand where the USAF is headed in terms of developing toolsets and managing data. Why? Because the USAF has made it evident that it has no appetite ... Read More

The government requires contracting officers to use a “structured approach” for determining the profit or fee objective in most noncompetitive acquisitions requiring cost analysis, but the FAR offers few specifics on how to do this. In this webinar, Dayton Aerospace's Tom Wells discusses the FAR’s requirements, as well as agencies’ ... Read More

Since 2002, the Department of Defense (DOD) has viewed Condition-Based Maintenance Plus (CBM+) as a transformational maintenance methodology, capable of improving productivity, shortening maintenance cycles, lowering costs, and increasing availability and reliability through improved business processes and as-it-happens information analysis. CBM+ data analysis methods and prognostic tools allow maintainers to ... Read More

Mr. Tom Wells, SES, DAF (Ret), has been selected as a speaker for the National Contract Management Association’s (NCMA) 2018 World Congress. Mr. Wells will discuss commonly used industry proposal management processes and related lessons learned in a workshop scheduled for Monday, July 23, 2018, at 10:30 am. Mr. Wells ... Read More

Dayton Aerospace recently presented Airworthiness Risk and MIL-HDBK-516C at the 2018 Aircraft Airworthiness & Sustainment (AA&S) Conference held April 23-26 in Washington, DC. Authored by airworthiness experts, Colonel Wayne Johnson, US Air Force (USAF) (Ret), and Ms. Dawn McGarvey-Buchwalder, former USAF Airworthiness Office branch chief, the presentation discussed lessons learned ... Read More