Mission Thread Workshops: Lessons Learned

In this presentation, we will discuss lessons learned from using mission thread workshops (MTW) as an early architecture-development step for a number of DoD systems of systems (SoS). The approach is based on defining a number of critical warfare vignettes, then developing some associated end-to-end mission threads that stress the envisioned capabilities of the SoS, and finally, augmenting these threads with quality attribute and capability considerations elicited from the SoS and system stakeholders in a facilitated workshop. Each MTW results in a set of challenges being developed during the follow-on activity.

We have reviewed and organized the challenges from 46 of these mission threads and found a surprisingly consistent overlap of the challenges developed, which are usability/automation, capability gaps, resource management, training, migration of legacy systems, and collaboration. The presentation will describe each of these general challenges in detail.