Plan Jericho is part of the Royal Australian Air Force's strategy to become a 5th-generation force — agile and fully immersed in the information age. A key theme of the strategy is transforming acquisition to reduce cycle times, capture innovation, and open the market to new suppliers, particularly Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) capable of bringing fresh ideas and ways of working.

In 2016, PCI supported the Plan Jericho team to develop the "Acquisition Sprint" — a collaborative procurement framework combining Design Thinking methodology with the robustness required of public procurement. The process was piloted on a time-critical challenge: procuring Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) Out capability for the RAAF Hawk Lead-In Fighter, which needed to be fitted by 2018 for the aircraft to fly in civilian airspace.

PCI's role:

• Worked with the Jericho team and its stakeholders to align on the framework and design an end-to-end procurement process that retained the integrity required of public procurement

• Designed the "Selection Funnel" — a four-stage process to rapidly shortlist potential suppliers, with evaluation criteria at each stage built to move the process toward a fully binding, priced design ready for execution

• Contributed to market-facing documentation detailing the new process, centred on co-creation of design, innovative thinking and radical collaboration between suppliers, users and client

• Helped detail process for the "5-Day Innovation Scrum" — bringing together the client, users (pilot, engineer and air traffic controller) and all interested industry suppliers in a single collaborative scrum to rapidly design streamlined specifications, reducing complex acquisition paperwork down to a concise 10-page specification document

Outcomes:

• The ADS-B project served as the test case for the Acquisition Sprint model, using a collaborative design scrum to dramatically compress delivery timelines

• Cut acquisition and delivery time from six years to three

• Demonstrated that cost efficiency could be achieved by funding direct prototyping and agile delivery, rather than committing to traditional, multi-year locked-in solutions

• The RAAF marked 10 years of innovation under Plan Jericho in March 2025, with Vice Chief of the Defence Force Air Marshal Robert Chipman describing Jericho as a brand that has remained a useful centre point for innovation in the Air Force, noting its impact extended beyond joint operations to strengthening the Air Force's relationships with industry, academia and international partners.