New Tools and Methods for Assessing Risk-Management Strategies

At the request of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), we provided the U.S. Navy two tools to help evaluate the process that novice acquisition officers use to integrate risk-management strategies with the federal military acquisition process. The Human Performance Knowledge Mapping Tool (HPKMT) was designed to evaluate the ability of subjects to depict the relationships among the key phases in the acquisition process and subject understanding of risk management. The Decision Analysis Tool (DAT) allowed subjects to use Expected Value and Multi-attribute Utility Theories to evaluate the risks and benefits of various acquisition alternatives, and allowed us to monitor the process subjects used to arrive at a procurement decision. When we evaluated the HPKMT knowledge maps of 17 subjects against expert maps developed by their instructors, we found that subject understanding of incorporating risk management in the acquisition process trended higher, but did not improve significantly. Sequential analysis of data from the DAT allowed us to isolate distinct risk-management strategies, as well as strategies that overly focused on (or ignored) aspects of risk management. The use of a referent to determine the conceptual relationships and strategic acquisition skills necessary to be a skilled acquisition officer are discussed as extensions of this work. Prepared in cooperation with the Univ. of Southern California, BTL.