Acquisition Manager

You are the junior program manager in an SSC product office. You don't run the program yet — you run the program's paperwork, meetings, and action items with enough discipline that the PM can actually run the program.

You work in a Program Executive Office product office at Space Systems Command — GPS, Next-Gen OPIR, SDA Tranche, NSSL, WGS follow-on, or one of a dozen others — tracking the integrated master schedule, coordinating program review preparation, drafting contract modification briefing packages, maintaining the program risk register, and supporting the budget submission cycle. You attend Defense Acquisition Executive Summary (DAES) prep meetings and take notes the PM can sign. You support milestone decision authority briefing preparation — writing the draft Acquisition Decision Memorandum background, pulling the earned-value data, coordinating the System Engineering Plan signature package. Nobody's handing you a contract to award; you're building the competencies and the DAWIA Practitioner credential that will get you there.

• 01Maintain the Integrated Master Schedule (IMS) — track contractor schedule deliverables, flag critical-path slips to the PM before the next IPT, not during it.
• 02Read an Earned Value Management (EVM) report: understand Cost Performance Index (CPI), Schedule Performance Index (SPI), and the Estimate at Completion (EAC) variance — and explain what they mean to the PM in plain language.
• 03Draft a program risk register entry with probability, consequence, mitigation, and a close-out criterion that isn't "monitor."
• 04Support a source selection: organize the proposal evaluation schedule, distribute technical evaluation assignments, track evaluator conflict-of-interest certifications.
• 05Execute DAU Program Management Practitioner course requirements on the published 63A career-field timeline.
• 06Operate in the FAR / DFARS environment: know the difference between a sole-source justification and a competitive acquisition, and why it matters to the program's legal review.

• —DoDI 5000.85 — Major Capability Acquisition. The milestone decision framework you will brief to and brief from throughout the 63A career.
• —FAR / DFARS — Federal Acquisition Regulation and DoD Supplement. The legal spine of every contract action the program office executes.
• —DoDI 5000.66 — Defense Acquisition Workforce Education, Training, Experience, and Career Development Program. The DAWIA certification framework.
• —DAFMAN 63-101/20-101 — Integrated Life Cycle Management. DAF acquisition management DAFMAN for SF program execution.
• —DAU ACQ 101 / ACQ 201 course series — the foundational PM certification curriculum.

• —DAWIA Program Management Practitioner certification completed within the career-field published timeline — the visible institutional signal for 63A LTs.
• —Integrated Master Schedule maintained current — no undocumented schedule slips, every contractor deliverable tracked.
• —TS/SCI clearance maintained clean — source selections and program data are classified; clearance loss is a functional career exit.
• —OPR support-form input on time with at least two named program deliverables supported — the rater cannot write a stratification from a blank form.

• —Letting IMS slips sit without escalation. A contractor who is two weeks behind on a deliverable and you haven't told the PM is a PM who gets surprised at the DAES brief. That PM remembers.
• —Treating the EVM report as a compliance document rather than a management signal. CPI below 1.0 for two consecutive periods is a trend; the PM needs to know before the DAES, not during.
• —Missing a DAU course enrollment. DAWIA Practitioner certification requires specific DAU courses with enrollment queues; missing the first window pushes the certification timeline into the O-4 board window.
• —Signing a conflict-of-interest certification for a source selection without reading the proposal you're certifying about. The legal review catches it; the record does not.

The strong junior 63A is the officer the PM sends to the contractor IPT as the PM's representative and trusts to come back with an accurate read. By month 18 she has maintained a clean IMS, flagged two schedule risks before they became DAES findings, and her DAWIA Practitioner enrollment is locked in. The contracting officer returns her calls.

You are the program manager, or you're the deputy running the program while the PM fights the PEO. Either way the cost, schedule, and performance of a billion-dollar space program has your name attached to it.

You lead a program or a major program element at SSC. You chair the Integrated Product Team, manage the contractor relationship through contract performance review and earned-value analysis, prepare the Defense Acquisition Executive Summary (DAES) and the Program Management Review (PMR) briefings, execute milestone decisions (Milestone B or C, or a follow-on program review), support source selections as the SSA or a senior technical evaluator, and run the POM / budget submission cycle for your program's FYDP line. You are the person the PEO calls when the Under Secretary's office has a question. DAWIA Program Management Senior Practitioner certification is in progress or complete. You're also managing the signals the O-4 board reads: a milestone completion, a contract award, a major risk retired.

• 01Lead the Integrated Product Team — set the agenda, enforce action item closure, manage contractor performance, and represent the program to the PEO without surprises.
• 02Brief a Defense Acquisition Executive Summary (DAES) to the Milestone Decision Authority staff — cost, schedule, performance, risk, and the program's honest status.
• 03Execute a source selection as SSA or senior evaluator — write the Source Selection Decision Document that survives a GAO protest.
• 04Run the Program Objective Memorandum (POM) submission for your program's FYDP line — know the budget build, the zero-sum trade-off math, and where the wedge lives.
• 05Manage the contractor EVM data stream: identify CPI/SPI trends, validate the contractor's Estimate at Completion, and brief the variance analysis to the PEO.
• 06Mentor junior 63A officers in the program office — assign developmental tasks, write OPR inputs, give honest developmental feedback.

• —DoDI 5000.85 — Major Capability Acquisition. The MDA decision framework and acquisition documentation requirements at Milestone B/C.
• —FAR / DFARS — Federal Acquisition Regulation and DoD Supplement. Protest-survivable source selection requires FAR Part 15 fluency.
• —DAFMAN 63-101/20-101 — Integrated Life Cycle Management. DAF-level acquisition management governing PMR, DAES, and MDA review packages.
• —DoD EVM Implementation Guide — the earned-value framework the DAES and the OSD CAPE audit reference.
• —DAFMAN 36-2406 — Officer Evaluation System. Know the OPR/PRF/Stratification mechanics before the O-4 board window.

• —DAWIA Program Management Senior Practitioner certification on track by Major promotion — the field-grade credential that the O-5 board reads.
• —Named milestone completion in the OPR narrative: Milestone B achieved, contract awarded, CDR completed, or major risk retired.
• —O-4 (Major) board selection — pull the current SFPC-published rates for your category; do not assume from rumor.
• —DAES brief delivered to MDA staff without a major finding requiring immediate program action — the PM who surprises the MDA staff loses institutional trust that takes a year to rebuild.
• —Physical Fitness Assessment under DAFMAN 36-2905 passed every cycle — small-service visibility compounds.

• —Entering a DAES brief with a cost or schedule variance the MDA staff didn't know about. The DAES is not the disclosure event; the PM who surprises the MDA with a Nunn-McCurdy threshold breach gets a different kind of program review.
• —Writing a Source Selection Decision Document that can't document the evaluators' rationale for each significant discriminator. GAO protest survival requires a documented, traceable record.
• —Letting contractor EVM data go unvalidated. A contractor with a CPI of 0.88 for three quarters whose EAC hasn't been formally revised is telling you the program is under-estimating the overrun. Trust the trend.
• —Treating the POM submission as someone else's problem. The PM who doesn't own the FYDP math for her program gets surprised when the PEO trades her program's out-year funding in the zero-sum POM adjudication.

The strong Captain or Major 63A is the officer the PEO calls before the USD(A&S) quarterly review: "What's our real status?" She has delivered a clean DAES twice, awarded a contract that survived the protest window, and her program's FYDP line is defensible at the OSD level. The contracting officer and the chief engineer both know her name, and they call her first.