A Risk Assessment Methodology and Excel Tool for Acquisition Programs

📖 The Scoop

Implementing risk management principles to manage large defense acquisition programs is a priority for the U.S. defense acquisition community. To assist those decisionmakers responsible for identifying the risk associated with major weapons programs, RAND researchers developed a methodology and accompanying Excel, information-based risk tool (the ѓ́ʻ+ѓAssessor Toolѓ́ʻ+ѓє́ћThe Assessor Tool offers an Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD)-level approach to the evaluation and measurement of system integration risk. That is, it is meant for assessors, such as OSD personnel, who may not be especially familiar with the specific program under evaluation but still may need to make judgments about the prograмѓ́ʻ+ѓє́œs risk. It is based on a tractable and comprehensive set of questions that can help evaluate integration risk at each point in the acquisition process. More specifically, the tool enables users to see how well integration risk is being managed by providing a standards-based valuation of integration issues that can lead to cost growth, schedule growth, and program performance. The userѕѓ́ʻ+ѓє́œ manual for the Assessor Tool is available in a companion document, An Excel Tool to Assess Acquisition Program Risk (by Lauren A. Fleishman-Mayer, Mark V. Arena, and Michael E. McMahon, TL-113-OSD, 2013). The Assessor Tool and its methodology may also be generalizable to an entire set of information-based risk assessment applications. Overall, the methodology and tool have many strengths, including being based on well-grounded theories, allowing for reproducibility and traceability, and the extensive flexibility to be used to evaluate risk for many different types of programs. To provide a benchmarking and validation of the risk scores calculated by the tool, future work could include the toolѓ́ʻ+ѓє́œs validation by tracking its output against a prograмѓ́ʻ+ѓє́œs performance.

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