Better Development Cost Estimating Through Modeling and Simulation
Abstract
The Office of the Secretary of Defense (Program Analysis and Evaluation) tasked LMI to study how defense acquisition reform, advanced business processes, and new high technologies have affected how products are developed for DoD and what methods should be used to estimate the costs of those developments. In the first phase, LMI examined the defense electronics sector using Global Positioning System receivers as an analog. In that earlier research we found that extant methods and models were not well regarded and, therefore, were not used. This second phase was undertaken to study and address the weaknesses in the legacy approaches. Using military missile defense programs as the subject sector, LMI sought to better characterize the development process and better define the factors that contribute to development cost using cause-and-effect diagramming. With the findings of this investigation, LMI assessed the usefulness of some unconventional estimation techniques. Specifically, we assessed the use of simulations and program execution modeling with cost-time diagrams to forecast the costs and schedules of development programs. We developed a plan to implement this new system throughout DoD.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 01, 2000
- Accession Number
- ADA378782
Entities
People
- Bobby Jackson
- David Lee
- Gerald J. Belcher
- John Dukovich
Organizations
- LMI