Transforming how the Air Force builds software

Summary

The challenge

The USAF oversees more than 659,000 personnel and a multi-billion dollar portfolio of technologies to support them. Software touches nearly every part of the force — from everyday business processes like personnel career management to mission-critical capabilities like aircraft inventory maintenance. When that software doesn’t work well, the consequences ripple across readiness, productivity, and retention.

Software delivery within the Air Force had long suffered from the same problems found across government and defense: multi-year timelines without incremental releases, minimal user involvement, and products that were frequently outdated by the time they reached production. The result was software built for compliance checkboxes rather than the airmen who had to use it every day — and a cycle of rework and rising costs that eroded confidence in the process itself.

In 2020, the Business Enterprise Systems (BES) directorate stood up BESPIN with seed funding from Air Force Service Acquisition Executive Dr. Will Roper. BES leadership had seen what organizations like Kessel Run could accomplish and believed the same model could work for enterprise business systems. But building that factory — defining its organizational model, team structures, delivery practices, procurement approach, and culture — required expertise that didn’t yet exist within BES.

BESPIN engaged us to help design and stand up this new kind of organization. The challenge went beyond technology: every process change touched security review, authority to operate, and acquisition regulation. Nothing about this could be imported wholesale from the commercial world. It had to be adapted for the Air Force’s specific constraints.

The solution

Before BESPIN could ship a single product, it needed an operating model. We started by coaching executives on what a modern software factory looks like inside the Air Force — helping leadership define BESPIN’s mission, articulate its value proposition, and internalize the shift from one-off projects to software delivered as a continuous service.

The organizational structure came first. We organized delivery teams into portfolios, stood up community of practice groups that cut across teams, and designed a customer intake process that ensured incoming projects were scoped for success. To establish a distinct identity within BES, we also supported BESPIN’s branding and communications — signaling a fundamentally different way of working that attracted both internal customers and talent.

Scaling required more than structure — it required people with new skills. Our workforce enablement work grew dozens of personnel into skilled practitioners across design, development, and product management through hands-on coaching, training, and pairing. Separately, we built service design capacity that helped teams connect product decisions to larger organizational outcomes across the Air Force.

Quality and consistency couldn’t depend on individual expertise alone, so we built two reusable infrastructure layers. A design studio gave teams on-demand access to design, product, and engineering support — compressing the path from idea to production to as few as 10 weeks. Two shared design systems — Carbon Forge for complex enterprise applications and Material Atlas for simpler mobile utilities — provided pre-built, accessible components so teams could ship faster without sacrificing usability.

The model has held up across a widening range of domains. BESPIN teams have shipped products spanning equipment feedback, fitness management, base inprocessing, aviation resource management, cost accounting, aircraft maintenance documentation, and mobile app development — each in a different corner of the Air Force, each validating that the structure, practices, and tooling work beyond the first few teams. The Weather Systems Program Office engages us through BESPIN to modernize 75+ weather applications — an effort that has grown into its own multi-year transformation.

Agile delivery means little if teams still wait years for a contract to procure the help they need. BESPIN had already tapped the Small Business Innovation Research program to reach innovative vendors, but that approach served a handful of teams — not a factory. We advised on how to expand acquisition practices that matched the speed of delivery so more teams could move through shorter procurement cycles instead of defaulting to the multi-year vehicles that would have negated the speed gains everywhere else.

The results

• Stood up BESPIN as the Air Force’s dedicated software factory, establishing software delivery as a core internal capability rather than an outsourced function
• Cleared the compliance bottleneck by documenting reusable pathways through the Air Force’s security and authority-to-operate requirements, so new product teams didn’t have to reinvent the process each time
• Compressed idea-to-production timelines to as few as 10 weeks and enabled continuous production releases through DevSecOps practices, replacing the multi-year delivery cycles and infrequent batch deployments that had been the norm
• Grew dozens of personnel into skilled practitioners across design, development, and product management through hands-on coaching, training, and pairing — building the internal capacity BESPIN needed to operate independently
• BESPIN teams now lead practices they initially learned through pairing, with community of practice groups, balanced team structures, and progressive coaching producing new practitioners who sustain and extend the model independently