Mission-Centered Delivery in Multi-Stakeholder Environments at HNCD
Overview
HNCD is the Defensive Cyberspace Operations Branch within the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) Cryptologic and Cyber Systems Division (HNC). HNCD develops, delivers and sustains Defensive Cyber capabilities essential to protect the nation, within the timeline and threat context inherent in Great Power Competition.
Because HNCD is designated as the integrated defensive cyberspace system for the entire Air Force, it is provided requirements from multiple user communities in addition to USCYBERCOM and is responsible for sustaining existing capabilities while building new ones simultaneously, all in a highly secure environment.
Challenge
HNCD was struggling to deliver at scale due to fragmented stakeholder requirements and conflicting priorities across multiple mission owners.
Product teams lacked a clear, shared view of who they were building for, leading to inefficiency, rework, and delayed capability delivery.
In order for HNCD to be a true integrating entity, it first needed to deeply understand its many stakeholders and their needs and wants in order to prioritize, plan, and deliver effectively in time for each set of users to be mission ready.
Approach
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We conducted 1:1 user interviews with warfighters and requirements owners, ran discovery workshops with product teams and HNCD leadership, and collected organizational-wide data through an anonymous survey.
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We produced a stakeholder map of the entire IDCS ecosystem, enabling leadership to once and for all see across the entire organization and its stakeholders, enabling the organization to make critical structural, organizational, and resource decisions.
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We produced core user personas from our operator interviews, enabling product teams to deeply understand for the first time who they were building for, what their pain points and needs were, and specific details about why the capability matters.
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We not only made direct contact with actual operators for the first time, but we also engaged requirement owners in a much more direct way, modeling for and providing HNCD with a repeatable mechanism for ongoing engagement with stakeholders moving forward.
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Once our stakeholder research, stakeholder map and user personas were complete and shared with HNCD, we were ready to provide a clear plan and path for developing a product roadmap to be used across product teams that would enable HNCD to prioritize and align stakeholder needs and wants with product team delivery ongoing.
Conclusion
Our work with HNCD demonstrates how even in the most complex, multi-stakeholder DoW environments, clarity is possible. By uniting stakeholder research, mapping, and engagement into a repeatable process, HNCD gained the foundational elements to prioritize effectively, align across product teams, and deliver mission-critical capabilities faster.