Fooling the Team Is Tougher Now

dependent (“intensive” is frequently misleading) system. Based on my experience with SCEs, I would like to offer the following additional comments. The Source Selection Evaluation Board should tailor the investigation to the particular project under consideration. If the project has more hardware development than software, the SCE should have a systems engineering flavor, and the evaluation team members’ experience should touch on all of the projected system’s domains. The evaluators should concentrate their efforts on the most significant characteristics of contractor capability. The small number of going-in questions should be open-ended. Their answers should provoke additional questions by the evaluators. The evaluators should spend time in one-on-one meetings with their opposite number. They should encourage interviewees to demonstrate how they use proposed tools and to show off their domain knowledge and their familiarity with the proposed software development plan. They should quiz interviewees about the projects they are working on to get some feel of whether the current work would be used on the project under source selection. There are other commonsense tricks to running an SCE, but—as the authors pointed out quite well—success ultimately depends on the team’s competence. Mark D. Levin Eglin AFB, Fla. [email protected]