It is important to emphasize that the authors have not
attempted to assess or evaluate the transition or Project Deepwater itself.
Instead, the report focuses on providing lessons learned from the transition
and offers three recommendations for contract management staff, agency
executives, and congressional and executive-level policy makers.

A key message from the report is that the federal government will need to
enhance its contracting capabilities (including the number of personnel working
on acquisition) to manage the “assembly” of complex products. In the case of
the U. S. Coast Guard, the last several years have been spent on enhancing both
the capability and the size of CG-9, the Coast Guard Acquisition Directorate.
One lesson from the Coast Guard experience is that federal agencies cannot
easily turn the “switch” overnight from an external LSI to moving the LSI role
in-house. The Coast Guard began the transition to CG-9 serving as the LSI in
2007, and it will not be completed until 2011. All new contracts for
Deepwater assets, however, are now being awarded by CG-9.

The Coast Guard’s Project Deepwater is still a work in progress, nearly 10
years after recognition by the Coast Guard that it needed an integrated
procurement program to procure its future assets (helicopters, ships, information
technology) and armaments. There is clearly much that the rest of
the federal government can learn from the Coast Guard experience. In
future years, an increased number of agencies will face the challenge of
deciding whether to undertake “contracted versus internal assembly” for
complex products. The report also concludes that the federal government
now needs a new set of policies and tools to enable it to more effectively
procure complex products.

It is clear that the federal government will continue to need to procure
complex products (such as large information technology projects) in the
years ahead. Lessons from the United States Coast Guard Deepwater
Project, both positive and negative, can clearly be helpful to other agencies.
We hope that this study will be useful and informative to leaders in
both the executive and legislative branches of government as they wrestle
with the challenge of acquiring complex products.

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