How do we qualify our system for the Navy?
Short Answer: No one knows
Before I founded Consus, I led government programs at a defense-tech startup. The team was hard at work building a system that would (ideally) be fielded on a Navy ship in the future. Early in the design sprint, an engineer asked me a very simple question:
How do we qualify our system for the Navy?
During my time at SpaceX, I had helped qualify countless components and systems. Luckily for us, the government made it quite clear that we had to follow the guidelines as defined in SMC-S-016 (with some nuance, which is a story for another day). Given my previous experience, I thought this would be an easy question to answer. I would be able to do a quick google search or ask my counterpart at the Navy and get a clear, simple answer.
I was so wrong……..
After a few weeks of exhausting online research and long email chains with various government staff, I still could not answer the question. Qualification could make or break our schedule, so I felt like I was letting the company down.
After neglecting the question for a couple of days (not recommend), I received an email with “instructions for qualification.” Given the previous back and forth, I was not convinced this would get me an answer. Turns out, I was right 😄
This emailed contained almost no instructions, but had a single PDF attachment. The author explained that everything related to qualification was in that PDF, but warned it had been a long time since a system was truly qualified.
Quick aside: Most systems in the field today have not gone through an extensive qualification program. The systems are revisions of systems built in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. Most have been used for years and no one has really needed to open this can of worms. SpaceX dealt with something similar in the early 2010s. The government was not used to new entrants and new products.
I opened the PDF and my heart sank. The PDF was about ten pages long. Each page was just a table with three columns: Document Name, Document Number, and Notes. The Navy had sent a list of roughly 50 government specifications and standards and essentially said “good luck.”
There was no way anyone could read all of those standards, extract the relevant information, and build anything resembling a coherent qualification plan. I know this because I tried. I spent days reading through specifications, trying desperately to understand what we needed to do. Some documents were easier to parse than others, but most were completely useless. To make matters worse, some of the documents had new revisions or were canceled in favor of other documents. I wasted weeks of time sorting through all this, and still couldn’t answer the original question.
This experience was one of the reasons I started Consus. If your company can’t get a straight answer on how to qualify the product it’s building for the government, you won’t survive long enough to figure it out by trial and error. Consus is in its early days, and we have a long way to go. However, we’re working hard to ensure you never have to worry about questions like this again.
If you are ready to stop wasting time and money navigating government documents, reach out and let us know how we can help.
Do you have a story you would like to share? Send me a message and we will do our best to feature it Requirements Hell.