System Earned Readiness Management for Defense Acquisition

Abstract

Under Naval Postgraduate School funding, the Principal Investigators have conceptualized and are currently validating a system maturity scale called System Readiness Level (SRL). It combines the currently accepted Technology Readiness Level (TRL) with an Integration Readiness Level (IRL) to assess a whole system developmental maturity and determine current and future readiness during the defense acquisition lifecycle. As a function of the TRL of the components and the IRL of the integrations, the SRL scale has been used by the PIs to develop system development optimization models that can maximize the SRL of the system subject to resource constraints or minimize the cost of development subject to attaining a pre-determined SRL value within a time constraint. This research builds upon these foundations to create a systems development lifecycle maturity management approach, which we define as Systems Earned Readiness Management (SERM). We envision SERM to be a suite of management tools which can be used to manage the development of novel high technology systems. Current research to date has produced a scheduling, monitoring and evaluation tool. In contrast with Earned Value Management (EVM), which focuses on cost and schedule, SERM addresses the earned readiness or maturity of system development as it equates to making strategic and programmatic decisions in defense acquisition. Future efforts will be directed towards complementing the scheduling and monitoring tool with additional methodologies such as Component Importance Analysis, management of Key Performance Parameters, and Interoperability to address issues associated with Multi-capability systems.