DEVELOPING AN ANALYTIC MODEL OF SUCCESS FOR ACQUISITION DECISION MAKING
Abstract
As acquisition processes become more complex, especially for large-scale business IT service systems, it has become more difficult to manage the scope, cost, schedule, and usability of a system both within and outside the government. With the size, complexity, and sheer amount of data these large IT systems produce, it is extremely challenging to collectively discern this data in order to make correct decisions. Procurement and acquisition professionals including systems engineers and program managers are constantly struggling with how to effectively and efficiently manage the budget, deliverables, and system quality of a program while trying to meet internal or external regulatory constraints. To address these challenging issues, Dr. KC Chang and his team at George Mason University propose to develop an analytic decision support system with an automatic quantitative reasoning engine. The proposed research intends to take the perspective of a program manager to build an evidential reasoning model oriented around the hypothesis of program success. The goal is to help systems engineers and program managers holistically process the available data/evidence in order to make better acquisition and management decisions. The proposed Acquisition Decision Management System (ADMS) is an expert-based model developed using probabilistic graphical models. It is designed to model the complex interrelationships as well as dynamic/temporal relationships in an acquisition process. ADMS allows a decision maker to assess project performance in specific subject matter knowledge areas and the overall likelihood of project success by taking into accounts both data and temporal uncertainty. While Defense Business Systems (DBS) acquisition will be used in this research as a specific focus and application example, the proposed approach is scalable to general procurement and acquisitions management process. The proposed ADMS can potentially provide benefits to systems engineer and acquisition professionals by enabling the practitioners to better diagnose and effective manage complex acquisition process in a wide array of public and private sectors.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Dec 06, 2016
- Source ID
- N002441710010
Entities
People
- K.c. Chang
Organizations
- George Mason University
- United States Department of Defense