Quantico, Virginia -- Last
month, intelligence Marines, designers, and developers formed a cohort and participated
in the first Marine Corps Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance Enterprise Accelerator to create a minimum viable product called Tellus. Tellus is a mashup of Life Alert, OnStar, and
Waze that provides operations and intelligence personnel with the ability to
report significant activities or events. Users can drag and drop icons that represent
the type of SIGACT being reported onto a map and add their unit ID. Tellus then auto generates an alert that
contains location information, unit ID, and SIGACT data and instantaneously
alerts operations and analyst personnel across the Intelligence Operations
Center, Combat Operations Center, Aviation Combat Element and Logistics Combat
Element.
The MCISRE Accelerator incorporates
processes and tools that startups use for product development to define and
prioritize problems, identify specific end users who need a solution for this
problem, brainstorm an MVP, and determine how to measure “product-solution” fit
as part of the development process. The
MVP concepts are conceived and initially designed by the Marines who
participate in the cohort. The entire
process takes 12 weeks and culminates in a demo day event in which the Marines then
pitch their MVP to MCISRE users, leadership, and supporting organizations. The demo day culminates in a decision that determines if, where, and how the MVP
will be transitioned to the fleet.
The MCISRE Accelerator’s
environment fosters rapid design and development of MVPs, services, and
capabilities. It creates a critical mass for innovation that shortens the
lifecycle for defining problem-solution fit and gets capabilities into the
hands of users quickly. Mentors
representing key stakeholders from across MCISRE and supporting organizations
support the cohort by removing barriers to transition; working with key
partners to capture and update requirements, doctrine, and policy; and
providing key resources to the cohort to help them stay on track with product
development.
By standing up the
MCISRE Accelerator, the Intelligence Department is falling in line with other
innovation initiatives in the Marine Corps as described in the Commandant’s
Planning Guidance published in January. “The end state of our experimentation
will be to develop and nurture the intellectual energy, innovation, and
creativity that will enable the Marine Corps to lead tactical and operational
innovation,” General Dunford noted in his planning guidance.
One of the main
objectives of the MCISRE Accelerator is to break large problems down into
discretely defined problems for which a simple, quick, and effective MVP can be
built in 12 weeks. The Tellus cohort started their concept development looking
at commonly discussed issues in the communications and network architectures
and policies and training that impacted access to, use of, and dissemination of
relevant data. They worked to identify key user segments that were impacted by
these problems and reached into the operating forces to get feedback that
helped them further decompose those problems until they could define a minimum
set of features that provided a universal, simple to use app that could operate
across networks and warfighting domains. Once these features were identified,
the cohort used wireframing techniques to storyboard the initial MVP
design. The initial MVP design was
documented and disseminated to other Marines in the operating forces for
feedback again. Using this feedback and
comparing this design to existing capabilities, the cohort then refined the MVP
design again to include only those features most requested in user feedback and
that did not already exist.
Once the
first week of concept development ends, the cohort developer team prototypes
the user interface and user features design, providing outputs to the cohort
members weekly for feedback and input. When
the cohort validates the user design, developers will execute four, two-week
sprints to build the MVP. Iterative capabilities are demonstrated at the end of
each sprint and the cohort engages in person and virtually throughout the
sprint to test each iteration of the MVP and provide feedback.
In addition
to the deployable MVP, key outputs of the MCISRE Accelerator include MVP
requirements, design, metrics, user feedback, and other data. These outputs are then used to inform the
MCISRE Functional Design.