DoD Services Acquisition Policy
DoDI 5000.74, Adaptive Acquisition Framework material, and services-acquisition guidance grounded the work in the actual pathway, roles, and oversight environment.
The final report is dated December 2025 and marked Distribution Statement A: Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. This page presents selected public-release highlights and visual summaries of the finished work.
Project Snapshot
The Work At A Glance
24
DoD and industry stakeholder interviews
339
KPI rows in the supplemental workbook
123
Report pages including supplemental material
7
foundational metric areas identified in the final abstract
The study used qualitative policy-document analysis, literature review, and interviews to define a practical architecture for measuring service-acquisition health across enterprise, portfolio, and contract levels.
Research Base
Built From Policy, Oversight, Theory, Practice, And Stakeholder Evidence
The project pulled from several research streams instead of treating KPI selection as a dashboard-design exercise. The final framework reflects acquisition policy, oversight findings, academic measurement theory, private-sector service-management practices, existing DoD contract surveillance tools, and interviews with senior DoD and industry stakeholders.
GAO, RAND, And Review Reports
External oversight and research helped identify the recurring gap between process visibility and outcome-based assessment of contracted services.
KPIs, Outcomes, And Balanced Systems
Public-sector performance measurement, balanced scorecard logic, leading and lagging indicators, and structure-process-outcome thinking shaped the framework.
QASP, CPARS, And Service Artifacts
Existing surveillance, assessment, and contract-management artifacts showed where useful data already exists and where governance is needed to make it comparable.
Industry Service Management
Private-sector service-level agreements, outcome-based contracting, relational contracting, and portfolio reporting informed what could transfer into a DoD setting.
24 Stakeholder Interviews
DoD and industry interviews tested whether the framework fit real acquisition work, including metric ownership, data burden, incentives, and decision usefulness.
Research Problem
Service Health Needs More Than Compliance Signals
DoD relies heavily on contracted services, but the Services Pathway lacks a standardized, outcome-based framework for assessing program health. Existing measures often emphasize process compliance, obligation rates, procurement lead time, competition, and administrative activity. Those measures are useful, but they do not consistently answer whether services are improving readiness, quality, cost-effectiveness, customer experience, or mission outcomes.
Primary Question
What outcome-based performance measures should be used to assess the health of services?
Supporting Questions
The project also examined how standardized metrics can improve DoD assessment and oversight, which private-sector KPIs can transfer to DoD service acquisitions, and what data collection challenges must be mitigated.
Framework
A Three-Part Performance Architecture
Final Contribution
From Measure Lists To Management System
Core-Plus-Tail
A governance model that standardizes a small enterprise-level core while preserving room for service-category tailoring and local contract diagnostics.
Enterprise Performance Visibility
A three-tier rollup structure connecting tactical contract measures to portfolio and enterprise visibility for senior acquisition leaders.
Flexible Balanced Scorecard
A scorecard approach that shows service health across cost, schedule, quality, customer satisfaction, compliance, readiness, stewardship, people, cyber, and innovation dimensions.
How It Works
Contract Signals Roll Up Into Enterprise Visibility
Contract Diagnostics
QASP, CPARS, schedule, cost, and user-value signals identify where management action is needed.
Portfolio Health
Category-tailored measures compare like services without forcing every contract into the same narrow dashboard.
Enterprise Decisions
Senior leaders get consistent visibility into readiness contribution, risk, customer value, and stewardship.
Balanced View
Service Health Across Multiple Dimensions
Metric Areas
Foundational Metric Areas
The final abstract identifies seven foundational metrics grouped across cost, schedule, quality, customer satisfaction, and compliance. The supplemental workbook expands that core into a larger KPI universe that can support enterprise reporting, service-category tailoring, and contract-level diagnosis.
Cost and cost avoidance
Schedule and timeliness
Service quality
Customer satisfaction
Compliance
Readiness contribution
Leading risk indicators
KPI Universe
The Supplemental Workbook Turns Research Into Usable Measures
Key Findings
What The Research Showed
1
Stakeholders reframed service health as measurable contribution to operational readiness, not simply completion of administrative activity.
2
DoD has useful process measures, but the Services Pathway still needs a more consistent way to connect contract performance to mission outcomes, user value, and portfolio-level decisions.
3
A tiered framework can support both standardization and flexibility: common enterprise metrics for rollup, tailored category metrics for relevance, and contract-level diagnostics for management action.
4
Data governance matters as much as metric selection. Each KPI needs a source, owner, cadence, target, and decision use so measurement does not become another compliance exercise.
Recommendations
Four Moves To Make Measurement Actionable
Pilot the EPV Three-Tier Model
Use a bounded pilot to test enterprise, portfolio, and contract-level reporting before scaling across the Services Pathway.
Update Policy
Update DoDI 5000.74 or related guidance to require the core metric set while allowing Core-Plus-Tail tailoring by service category.
Automate the Data Chain
Connect structure, process, and outcome data in the acquisition data infrastructure so reporting is repeatable and less manually intensive.
Develop the Workforce
Train acquisition teams on pre-award metric discipline, including how to define outcomes, establish targets, connect QASP surveillance, and avoid gaming or metric overload.
Visual Summary
Document Highlights
Why It Matters
A Practical Way To See Whether Services Are Working
The project turns a broad problem into an implementable performance-management architecture. Its value is not just a list of KPIs, but a way to govern, structure, and visualize service-acquisition health so DoD leaders can compare performance, identify risks earlier, and make better decisions about contracted services.