Program managers often find themselves navigating through a multifaceted and sometimes unwieldy military acquisition process. As designers and manufacturers ready new weapons systems and tools for the warfighter, production and deployment timelines slip if those systems and tools can't perform as designed. This is often because supporting technologies aren't yet ready for prime time.

If military officials find this out too late, huge investments may be wasted. What's more, warfighters in the field, who may be kept waiting for critical capabilities, could be put at increased risk.

This problem can now be addressed through technology readiness assessments, or TRAs. TRAs help military officials ensure that critical technologies are sufficiently mature to allow the systems that depend on them to be developed and deployed without glitches. They also facilitate risk-mitigation planning, should technology maturity fall behind schedule.

But TRAs have had their own problems—with few automated tools available, the assessment process can be painstakingly slow, and the results can be inconsistent. MITRE has completed initial work on a new, standardized software toolset aimed at providing users with an improved view of the capabilities of each critical technology and enabling them to estimate how long it will take for those technologies to reach maturity. The prototype toolset assists project managers in planning and conducting technical assessments by tracking risk mitigation events during system development and reporting on progress and pitfalls. This work, started in late 2004, comes on the heels of internal research MITRE began in 2003 to develop a more standardized methodology for conducting technology assessments.

These efforts have enabled a major improvement in the speed and accuracy of TRAs, which means that technology risks are more easily managed, system design and production decisions can be better informed, and overall risk in system acquisition is reduced.

"The Department of Defense is refining its acquisition processes to make them faster and more responsive to warfighters and to make it less expensive and less risky to develop new weapons systems and other components," explains MITRE's William J. Neal, Special Assistant for Integrated Army Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR). So far the Army is pleased with the results of MITRE's work on the TRA process improvements and toolset developments, he says.

Moving Acquisitions Along

"MITRE has been credited with adapting the process to allow for evolutionary acquisition, enabling the DoD to move ahead into the manufacturing phase even while certain critical technologies are still in development," Neal says. "In the past, before moving into the design and manufacturing stages, the DoD would fully develop each supporting technology. This resulted in very extended times for making acquisitions."

According to Neal, MITRE's refined process allows senior leaders to judge whether science, technology, and design can proceed simultaneously, which reduces the life cycle of programs by years.

This is a particularly significant contribution, because before our staff developed this process, program managers had little guidance for technology assessments. Historically, MITRE sponsors used as their primary TRA guide a DoD publication called the TRA Deskbook. "The Deskbook explains what needs to be done, but not how to go about doing it, which results in a tedious TRA process," says Carolyn A. Kahn, lead economics and business analyst in MITRE's Center for Acquisition and Systems Analysis. For instance, the non-standardized software the Army used until recently to conduct TRAs had been in use since the first publication of the TRA Deskbook in 2002.

The TRA process is aimed at helping MITRE's sponsors keep their "system-of-systems" working together as efficiently as possible. But this happens only when all major components deliver on their requirements. Army officials knew they needed a better way of tracking the development of critical technologies.

In 2003, as part of an effort to streamline the overall acquisition process, the DoD announced it was requiring TRAs to be conducted for critical technologies in all major defense acquisition programs. (Previously, assessments were required only for programs with budgets of $1 billion or more.) This stepped up the pressure to improve the TRA process, add more specific instructions to the TRA Deskbook, and cut down on waste of time and money caused by having multiple different processes for conducting TRAs, Kahn explains. In 2004, the Army's Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology directed MITRE to start development on a new TRA assessment toolset.

Risk Assessment Drives Development Decisions

The toolset helps users track data and relationships among various components of the critical technologies and generates summaries of key data about those relationships. It includes the Technology Readiness Level Abacus, which produces a technology readiness level for each source within a critical technology, and the Risk Analysis Tool, which is based on the MITRE-developed, government-owned RiskLine software. The Risk Analysis Tool generates standard reports and supports tracking of risk mitigation. RiskLine supports risk assessment and management and assesses the probability of certain occurrences along with their relative potential impact to the overall project. It is an extension of MITRE's trademarked Portfolio Analysis Machine (PALMA), which has been used to analyze the technology maturity of critical technologies for TRAs.

"Program managers need to know which technologies or capabilities will allow them to best achieve the overall objectives of their program," explains Aricka J. Hawkins, senior operations research analyst. "PALMA allows program managers to determine which portfolio of capabilities is most cost effective."

For a technology to be considered "mature," it must have already been used in a prototype system, subsystem, or component; been tested in an operational environment; and found to perform adequately for the intended application. A technology is considered "critical" if the system being acquired depends on the technology to meet key operational requirements and if either the technology or its application are new. A new technology is critical if it is necessary to achieve the successful development of a system, its acquisition, or its operational utility.

Assessing the Future of TRAs

In the future, MITRE would like to refine the methodology and toolset design and add features for streamlined, automated, and independent use. We also want to include the integration of risk mitigation processes and risk analytic performance measurements directly into the process and toolset. Eventually, the TRA process could make a complete migration to a Web environment. MITRE's TRA toolset prototype and the lessons learned from this work can be leveraged to help other sponsors conduct TRAs more efficiently and effectively.

"The ultimate goal would be to allow the services to be able to use an automated and streamlined methodology for conducting TRAs," Hawkins says.

—by Maria S. Lee

Related Information

Websites

• MITRE: Acquisition and Systems Analysis
• Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence FFRDC

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