Large military programs face a coordination problem when taking on broad and interdependent program objectives. While small programs with decoupled teams can often rely on a more ad-hoc approach to planning and roadmaps, large programs with complex dependencies often must develop master schedules that can encompass as many as 50,000 elements. In such an environment, teams need to be able to coordinate efforts and meet cross-cutting objectives. In the absence of better tools, when tasked with a major program objective, teams turn to PowerPoint to outline quarterly activities. While such an approach affords some visibility into program activities, the end result is a slide deck that may only be current for four days per year, since there is no direct mechanism for updating the document between quarterly updates. In addition to creating overload, this approach is inadequate to answer three critical questions:

• Is there anything you planned to complete last quarter but didn’t? If so, what is the impact?
• How confident are you about completing commitments this quarter?
• Is there anyone you are dependent on, and are they aware?

In aviation, waypoints guide pilots through complex flight plans, providing structure while maintaining flexibility. Inspired by this aviation principle, I worked with Lieutenant Colonel Adam Satterfield of the United States Air Force to create a lightweight digital framework that will help major programs plan, track, and execute major objectives. This post explains how the Waypoints Framework can provide program managers with a lightweight digital approach to visualizing major activities, synchronizing dependencies across teams, and managing risks.

The Origin of Waypoints

As a Program Management Officer in the United States Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel Satterfield oversees major defense programs. Lt. Col. Satterfield, a co-creator of Waypoints, had a sheet of paper hanging up in his cubicle that outlines the ideas that became the origin of Waypoints. Lt. Col. Satterfield had previously met with the Colonel in charge of his major program, who listed three requirements for Waypoints:

• It needs to be simple.
• It needs to be led by the team leaders.
• It needs to visualize the work.

To achieve these requirements, Lt. Col. Satterfield understood that a minimum viable framework was needed to bridge the gap between informal planning and comprehensive project management. The framework needed to be able to address coordination needs without overwhelming the organization.

Lt. Col. Satterfield began collaborating with us, and our initial step was to consolidate our planning efforts in Excel. While this shift improved dependency visibility and created a single source of data, quarterly accuracy problems persisted.

The breakthrough came when we migrated to Jira and Confluence. Jira allowed us to track individual waypoints as issues, while Confluence provided knowledge management and dynamic dashboards. It allowed teams to filter waypoints into quarterly buckets, sort by due date, and trace paths toward goals, reducing cognitive overload while enabling continuous updates.

More importantly, this digital approach fundamentally changed the organization’s planning mindset. Instead of waiting for quarterly reviews to discover that a milestone had been missed, program managers now had insight into issues and progress in near real time. Teams could adjust course immediately once an issue arose rather than discovering problems months after they emerged.

Far too often, program managers mistakenly ask, Are we where we want to be? Instead, they should be asking, Are we on the right trajectory?

The mindset associated with the first question involved missing a mark before correcting course. The latter allows for corrections en route, similar to a pilot adjusting the heading of an airplane between waypoints rather than discovering that they missed their destination because the winds pushed them off course.

Building the Waypoints Framework

The Waypoints Framework uses a lightweight digital approach to visualize major activities, synchronize dependencies, and manage risks. Jira and Confluence are the two major digital tools that enable the framework. The Waypoints journey often begins with a goal that a program wants to achieve in two or three years that is often made public because of its significance to the entire organization, such as the first flight of the B-21 stealth bomber in November 2023. Achieving that major goal requires the effort of multiple teams.

Each team in the program enterprise establishes its own waypoints leading toward this major programmatic goal, which creates a visible path that everyone in an organization can follow. Each waypoint represents a promise, a planned activity that unlocks another programmatic activity toward a goal.

The Waypoints Framework rests on three principles:

• Right-sizing: To help distill complexity to a comprehensible level, the organization’s team leaders will identify two-to-eight activities per quarter per team with those teams maintaining detailed planning using whatever tools work best. When too many activities are planned, the effort to maintain accurate plans increases. Keeping the quarterly planned accomplishments to single digits helped ensure the plan’s accuracy. For each activity, each team will identify their definition of done and outline major contributions towards the major programmatic goal set forth. This step alone can often be an early indicator of mismatches and incorrect handoffs.

Figure 1: The first principle, right-sizing, limits the number of activities per quarter to improve plan accuracy.

• Time-phasing: The Waypoints Framework requires high-fidelity planning for the current quarter plus the next two, medium-fidelity for the following two six-month periods, and lower-fidelity for subsequent twelve-month periods. This keeps near-term work sharp without wasting effort on distant objectives where uncertainties may remain.

Figure 2: The second principle, time-phasing, puts the greatest fidelity in the near-term phases of the plan.

Uncover problems early: Mapping dependencies between each team’s waypoints [HAB1] [KD2] identifies coordination gaps and bottlenecks before they become crises. Additionally, “orphan” waypoints are now easily spotted. While the activity may still be important to the organization, if it is not critical to achieve the major programmatic goal, it should be considered for removal from the sight picture, in order to maintain a simple view of critical activities to reach the goal. While the activity may still be important to the organization, if it is not critical to achieve the major programmatic goal, it should be considered for removal from the sight picture. This helps maintain a streamlined view of critical activities necessary to reach the goal.

Figure 3: The third principle, uncover problems early, maps dependencies between waypoints to identify gaps and bottlenecks.

We realized that for organizations to successfully adopt Waypoints, they would need three critical leadership and team commitments:

1. leadership endorsement without mandate (creating “pull” rather than “push”),
2. a lean motivated launch team, and
3. a guarantee that a team’s updates to their waypoints will take no more than five minutes.

With these commitments in place, as shown below with our early-adopter teams, Waypoints replaces the dreaded quarterly PowerPoint update.

Piloting Waypoints and the 5-Minute Guarantee

To pilot the Waypoints Framework, we identified three early-adopter teams that were fluent in digital tools like Jira and Confluence. After sitting down with these three teams and identifying their waypoints as well as upstream and downstream dependencies, within a quarter, we were able to successfully launch their programs into this framework and demonstrate the benefit of visualizing their activities in lightweight digital tools.

The team leaders who piloted Waypoints quickly realized that it allowed them to be ready for any programmatic review within five minutes, a significant value proposition as they previously had spent one-to-two days preparing PowerPoint slides each quarter.

Waypoints also significantly improved team communication. We presented Waypoints as a collaboration tool—not a work tracker—a crucial distinction that reduced adoption resistance. Leaders in the early adopter organizations encouraged but didn’t mandate adoption, and teams proved receptive to new approaches.

Waypoints identification workshops helped teams visualize plans and understand scope. We conducted dependency mapping workshops that uncovered incomplete handoffs early, enabling plan corrections before problems materialized.

The teams that piloted Waypoints also became disciplined about scoping, capturing only the work essential to programmatic goals.

Scaling Challenges and Solutions

Adoption within the organization was so successful that the Launch Team became a constraint in helping teams build their waypoints and dependencies between teams that must be visualized and managed to ensure handoffs are successful. In piloting our framework, we learned that we needed to identify at least one change agent on each team and empower them to learn the digital tooling to help scale the effort. Instead of teams waiting on the Launch Team’s calendar availability, we could have spread the effort more evenly across the organization.

We also came to understand that we needed to have a plan to transition to execution of the work. A clear point of contact within the organization must be identified as the person responsible and empowered for orchestrating all teams’ activities in order to reach the major programmatic goal.

Even in an organization that has a high trust culture, we found that configuration control of the Jira data became necessary. Our business intelligence relies on the accuracy of the data, so we found that assigning a data steward (i.e., an individual who really understands the network of waypoints that will lead to successful completion of the goal) to be necessary.

Future implementations of the Waypoints Framework will incorporate the designation of team members to each of these key roles, building upon the always-evolving, always-improving blueprints we learn when programs embark on the Waypoints Framework journey.

Interested in Adopting Waypoints?

Working in acquisition requires a never-ending cycle of reporting that leaves little time to focus on solving problems or achieving goals. The Waypoints Framework is designed to streamline that process and allow program managers to focus on their mission goals, often with their existing program management tools.

Effective program management should not require massive bureaucracy. Inspired by a routine navigational concept from aviation, we have created a framework that allows defense programs to achieve ambitious objectives through incremental coordinated programs. In piloting the Waypoints Framework, we learned that every organizational setting is a unique journey that will require adjustments. One benefit of working at the SEI is that through our work with major defense programs, we have encountered and gained an appreciation for varied customer environments and understanding the unique tailoring that will be required for each scenario.

If you are interested in working with the SEI to adopt the Waypoints Framework, please send an email to [email protected].