A MODEL FOR MEASURING TRA AND ENABLING ENGINEERING ACTIVITIES, AND SYSTEM QUALITY FOR U.S. DoD ACQUISITION PROGRAMS

Abstract

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) continually invests in the improvement of its acquisition process and overall program execution of defense systems. This is often done in order to provide greater, more effective and reliable warfighting capability, at affordable cost and within reasonable schedules. Despite these initiatives, defense acquisition programs have experienced risk in the form of cost overruns, schedule delays, and poor technical performance. In recent years, DoD has imposed assessment of technology maturity through the implementation of Technology Readiness Assessment (TRA) on all its acquisition programs in order to mitigate these risks by capturing the right knowledge at the right time. However, the number of scholarly studies that evaluate the extent that defense acquisition programs are implementing DoD mandates and best-practices that enable TRAs is limited. Furthermore, the correlation between TRAs, TRA enabling engineering activities, and military system quality has not been examined in a quantitative scholarly manner. In this study, a framework was developed to measure the relationships between DoD's TRA and enabling engineering activities, and U.S. military system quality. The framework was developed in conjunction with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from DoD, Intelligence Community (IC), and Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA) and empirically examined using a sample of 223 engineers, program managers, and executives from various U.S. DoD acquisition programs. Additional data was collected by structured interviews with 11 senior ranking acquisition executives. The results of this study suggest that there is significant correlation between tenets of TRA and systems quality. In addition, the data gathered from the interview subjects provides insight into how DoD organizations and contractors comply or fail to comply with TRA and inter-related tenets.