With an operation as large as the Department of Defense (DoD), people expect pain points in almost any process. One of the biggest for the DoD and the intelligence community as a whole is security clearance reciprocity.

In the intelligence community, reciprocity is the transferring of security clearance between one agency and another. That can present a problem when someone needs clearance that seamlessly travels between, for example, the Department of Defense, Department of State and Department of Homeland Security. That’s because each department has its own regulations around security as well as different systems.

The DoD and intelligence community have decided to put Lean methodology strategies to work to address this issue. It’s a path already followed by government agencies seeking to merge and agencies looking to future-proof the federal workforce.

The Importance of Security Clearance Reciprocity

The costs associated with providing reciprocity hit not only the government agencies, but also any contractors working with those agencies. In 2019, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) estimated that reciprocity failures cost $2 billion in the intelligence community, the cost of 1,000 lost contractor-labor years, according to Clearance Jobs, a website that focuses on jobs for professionals with federal security clearances.

The study reported that across the entire government, problems with the system cost $8 billion. It also can lead to delays on projects as contractors wait to get security clearance before they can start.

Using Lean to Change the Process

The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) oversees the system of security clearance reciprocity. In 2021, they revealed at a seminar that they had put Lean strategies into place to lower the lag time in issuing clearances.

They revealed the results of a study conducted between January and May 2020. At the start of the study, the lag time for a clearance averaged 65 days. That meant contractors or those coming from other government agencies had to wait more than two months before they could start working on projects that included DoD cleared contracts.

By the end of the study, that lag time had been reduced to just six days.

The key change involved cutting out wasted time on tasks that did not better serve people in the process. Specifically, DCSA reduced the need for review by the Vetting Risk Operations Center. Instead, they allowed security managers to send requests directly to the DoD’s Consolidated Adjudications Facility (CAF).

As of now, this procedure only applies to those looking to transfer clearance to the DoD. However, the new process has given other agencies a clear framework to follow. Long-term, the hope is to put all security clearances through one, centralized system.

Eliminating Waste, Saving Time

The use of Lean has been especially effective in the military, where large, complex operations can lead to logjams. The need to eliminate waste is the main reason government agencies, hospitals, law firms, private companies and other organizations have turned to the methodology. When a process clearly needs to cut unneeded steps and become more efficient, Lean provides proven tools and techniques to get the job done.