Building a People-Centered Solution for the U.S. Air Force’s Kessel Run

Through the Harvard Kennedy School’s Technology and Innovation in Government field lab, our student team was tasked with “helping Kessel Run deliver software faster and better.” At first, the problem statement seemed simple. A software problem would require a software solution, we assumed at the beginning of the class. Should Kessel Run use an enterprise knowledge repository? Which technical skills development platform should they purchase? Should they create standardized coding practices? 

But after more than 40 interviews with Kessel Run and Department of Defense employees, our team arrived at a surprising conclusion: software is not the answer. We wanted to solve a culture problem that required a people-centered solution. We found that the best way to help Kessel Run deliver software faster and better was to standardize their onboarding practices and help them launch an annual Hackathon.

What is Kessel Run?

Kessel Run winning the U.S. Air Force’s General Larry O. Spencer Innovation award and the Theodore Van Karman award

Based in Boston, Kessel Run is responsible for creating innovative ways to develop and procure technology for the U.S. Air Force. While they have been celebrated for this work, Kessel Run has grown incredibly fast—from just a handful of enterprising airmen to 1,200 employees in two and a half years. For this reason, Kessel Run is understandably facing some growing pains. We liken these growing pains to a house. 

When Kessel Run started in 2017, they built a house that properly fit their current  employees. Now, Kessel Run has over 1,200 people and almost the same structure. While they have certainly made small upgrades, they need to remodel the house to support the growth that they have experienced. 

Our Solutions

After considering dozens of pain points, we landed on Onboarding and Continued Employee Education as the two most high-impact areas we could address. 

On the left is the onboarding playbook, on the right is the hackathon playbook

Onboarding

Onboarding at Kessel Run currently happens in a fragmented way. One person we interviewed told us that they had to be proactive about finding the information they needed.  

We worked in collaboration with Kessel Run’s current onboarding leadership to restructure the process so that it has a condensed timeline, clear objectives, and updated content. The goal is to build community from day one. To do this, we delivered an onboarding schedule, a brochure and course bulletin that explain the courses to new employees, and a playbook for leadership to use when running the sessions. 

Continued Employee Education (Hackathon)

To encourage employees’ continued education, Kessel Run has licenses for technical training software and ad-hoc programs that bring in academics or private-sector technology experts looking to contribute to Kessel Run’s mission. However, we felt there was more Kessel Run could do to help their employees access opportunities for continued education and to change the culture around learning at Kessel Run.  

Private-sector technology companies have found hackathons to be effective at fostering creativity, increasing collaboration, and motivating learning. Building off these lessons, we decided to build an annual, week-long hackathon product. Our deliverable is complete with learning objectives, timelines, a challenge selection rubric, and review committee guidelines. When we shared these artifacts with Kessel Run employees, over and over again we heard quotes like “wow I love this, I already have so many ideas” and “I can’t wait to participate in something like this.”

Onward and Upward

Presenting our final products and recommendations to Kessel Run Leadership

This past week, our team presented our two ready-to-deploy solutions to the leadership of Kessel Run, including Col. Brian Beachkofski, Chief of Staff Hannah Hunt, Branch Chief Adam Furtado, and Branch Chief Lt Col Aaron “Easy” Capizzi—an alum of the class! We are thankful for Kessel Run’s excitement about and commitment to our work. Specifically, we appreciate the dozens of hours Kessel Run employees spent talking with us, their openness in conversation, and the work they do to protect our country every day. We are grateful to have been a part of their mission.

Thank You To The Leadership Who Supported Us!

Meet the Team

Lauren Lombardo is a first-year master in public policy student at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Daniel (Danny) Ragheb is a senior at Harvard College studying neurobiology, government, and psychology.

Kyle Witzigman is a first-year master in public policy student at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Carra Wu is a junior at Harvard College studying math, computer science, and economics.

Solving the Growing Pains of the U.S. Air Force’s Kessel Run

Through the Harvard Kennedy School’s Technology and Innovation in Government field lab, our student team has been working to help Kessel Run, the U.S. Air Force’s internal software factory, deliver software faster and better. 

We’ve spent the semester interviewing Kessel Run and DoD employees to understand how their problems, solutions, and processes have changed as they grew from a small startup handful of individuals to a larger organization of more than 1,200. We started our work by asking questions to current civilian and military employees, branch chiefs, military innovation groups, and the Commander of Kessel Run. 

Brainstorming Solutions  

Our initial interviews revealed many internal frustrations; including concerns about the hiring process, employee onboarding, technology development, programming practices, the build-it-yourself culture, and client acceptance. We spent weeks brainstorming simple and large, easy and impossible, and proven and unique solutions to each problem statement we heard.

In the end, we compiled all of our thoughts into a research document that outlined each pain-point and proposed several solutions found through academic and market research. 

Table of contents from our research document - an overview of every topic we researched

We used this document to guide numerous conversations with Kessel Run Commander, Colonel Enrique Oti and Lieutenant Colonel Aaron Capizzi, iterating until we ultimately focused on two points: onboarding and continued employee training.   

After narrowing in on these focus areas, we agreed on four major ideas: 

1. “Hack the Air Force” - Create an annual, one-week Kessel-Run wide hackathon where cross-branch Kessel Run teams work towards innovative solutions for some of the most challenging problems within the U.S. Air Force. 

2. Overhaul Employee Onboarding. Make the onboarding content branch-specific, onboard new employees in cohorts, and simplify and condense the onboarding training program. 

3. Formalize Continued Training Opportunities. Centralize and publicize all of Kessel Run’s continued training opportunities for employees by providing access to Coursera and Pivotal licenses, encouraging externships, and supplying  “lunch-and-learn” sessions. 

4. Train the Enabler. Create a formalized training process for Kessel Run “enablers”, which are employees that on-boardees shadow. 

Since narrowing to these four ideas, we’ve spent the past two weeks prototyping low-fidelity versions, and then quickly iterating on them as we receive feedback from Kessel Run employees across branches and positions. Below is an example of a low-fidelity prototype for how Kessel Run might change their onboarding structure. 

Example of an onboarding prototype

By walking through this example with employees across branches, we have been able to make critical changes to the proposed onboarding content, timeline, and structure. Over the next few weeks we will continue to iterate and test each of our prototypes in order to ensure that our final products are not only usable, but address a few of the key challenges that Kessel Run is facing. 

If you want to learn more, or have thoughts on our project, please contact us at innovategov.kesselrun@gmail.com.

Meet the Team

Lauren Lombardo is a first-year master in public policy student at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Daniel (Danny) Ragheb is a senior at Harvard College studying neurobiology, government, and psychology.

Kyle Witzigman is a first-year master in public policy student at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Carra Wu is a junior at Harvard College studying math, computer science, and economics.

Harvard Students Partner with the U.S. Air Force to Help Kessel Run Grow

Kessel Run’s flagship office has all the trappings of a high flying startup: open floor plans, glass-walled meeting rooms, whiteboards on wheels, and shared spaces. The laid-back office design is complemented by the company dress code; a t-shirt and jeans. But, looks can be deceiving. This team of programmers, product managers, and designers operate within the United States Air Force to provide the software that guides Airmen through training and combat. 

photo: view from the Kessel Run office in downtown Boston

It takes Kessel Run four months to get an idea from the whiteboard to the field, which makes them  24 times faster at developing software than the rest of the Air Force. This success was met with additional investment, and over the last 2 ½ years Kessel Run grew from 25 employees to 1,200. 

As Kessel Run has grown from their initial lean startup to a larger organization they have begun to see decreasing returns on the Air Force’s investment of additional money and personnel. This has sparked a fear that the organization is facing serious growing pains that are prohibiting these returns, including exponential technical complexity and a growing internal bureaucracy. 

It is this challenge that our team is working to solve. We are a group of Harvard students studying public policy, computer science, and digital government. Over the next two months, we will be working with Kessel Run to improve the way it deploys and develops software as part of a Technology and Innovation in Government field lab. This course, now in its fifth iteration, employs students to solve government problems with real-world clients. 

Understanding Kessel Run 

Kessel Run started as a small project within the Defense Innovation Unit. Since its inception it has brought together contractors, active duty military, and civilian technologists in an attempt to create a new way of developing software for the United States Air Force.

photo: active duty member of the U.S. Air Force on the way to the Kessel Run office

The Defense Innovation Board, a group that advises the Department of Defense (DoD) on innovative means to address future challenges, admitted that the DoD’s approach to software is broken, saying: “it takes too long, is too expensive, and exposes warfighters to unacceptable risk by delaying their access to tools they need to ensure mission success.”  

For a while, it looked like Kessel Run would be the solution. Kessel Run has been widely recognized as “the gold standard of military tech done right” and a report released by the Defense Innovation Board claimed that Kessel Run “ha[s] demonstrated that the flexibilities exist within the existing system to develop, procure, deliver, and update software more quickly.” In other words, it looked like Kessel Run might solve the “it takes too long, is too expensive” problem. 

But, while many outside of Kessel Run see the organization as an example of innovation within the DoD, our initial interviews with Kessel Run employees revealed many internal frustrations; including concerns about the hiring process, employee onboarding, technology development, programming practices, the build-it-yourself culture, and client acceptance. Kessel Run has shown that software can be delivered faster and better and it has done so by valuing continuous improvement. Many of the employee frustrations stem from the stagnation of this value, the concern that while Kessel Run is a significant improvement over the ‘norm’, this improvement cannot become the new standard. 

photo: Danny Ragheb interviewing with a member of the Kessel Run team

Next Steps

These interviews, combined with observed growing pains, complicate Kessel Run’s claim to be a solution to the DoD’s broken software development process. But, for our team, this information is invaluable. We’ve been able to use these insights to identify Kessel Run’s major pain points and are excited to spend the rest of the semester brainstorming and prototyping solutions for cultural, technical, and operational challenges. 

We have met with 31 Kessel Run and Department of Defense employees. Within this group, everyone we interviewed has a different perspective on what is no longer working and varying opinions on how to sustain the culture and mission that Kessel Run started with. Many of the Kessel Run employees we talked with warned us that it will be challenging for their teams to abandon existing structures and processes. Primarily because the organization operates within the largest bureaucratic institution in the world; but, also because scaling a small team into a thousand-person organization typically requires quickly adopting or discarding new structures to help manage the increased scale. 

But, there is good news. Many of the employees we talked with are excited about finding solutions that will enable Kessel Run to scale into a reliable software development organization. Most importantly, they are committed to the work that they do and the Airmen they serve. And while opinions differ on how to solve Kessel Run’s growing pains, we have gotten consistent feedback about why employees choose Kessel Run as a place to work. They want to make a meaningful difference, and we’re honored to help them do so. 

If you want to learn more, or have thoughts on our project, please contact us at innovategov.kesselrun@gmail.com. 

Meet the Team

Lauren Lombardo is a first-year master in public policy student at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Daniel (Danny) Ragheb is a senior at Harvard College studying neurobiology, government, and psychology.

Kyle Witzigman is a first-year master in public policy student at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Carra Wu is a junior at Harvard College studying math, computer science, and economics