This page is part of our decommissioning toolkit.
In early 2003, the National Audit Office began a series of work on benchmarking the Ministry of Defence’s acquisition system. The aim of this work is to add value to the Ministry of Defence’s understanding of the key influences upon the acquisition system and how these can best be managed to achieve timely and cost-effective delivery of capability.
PA Consulting Ltd were commissioned to undertake some systems dynamics based analysis of the MoD’s acquisition system to identify the key drivers of the performance of major defence projects.
This analysis was unique in looking from the outside at the broader drivers bearing on the success of the MoD’ s internal processes, rather than at the processes themselves.
The NAO adopted an inclusive and incremental approach. Inclusive in that the Ministry of Defence was closely involved at all stages and incremental in that there were discrete steps to manage the risks involved and ensure the utility of the outputs in terms of improved acquisition of military capability.