Using a System Maturity Scale to Monitor and Evaluate the Development of Systems

The readiness of a system under development cannot be adequately measured by using traditional project management tools that focus predominantly on cost and schedule. An alternative principally utilized by NASA, the DoD and the DoE to address this has been the prescriptive metric known as Technology Readiness Level (TRL). However, TRL is only meant to measure the readiness of technology elements and does not address their integration or some other challenges of systems development. To address integration, the Systems Development & Maturity Laboratory (SD&ML) at Stevens Institute of Technology introduced another prescriptive metric called Integration Readiness Level (IRL). Combining TRL and IRL scales, SD&ML has formulated a System Readiness Level (SRL). SRL is an aggregate measure that characterizes the progress that has been accomplished by a system under development based on the observable readiness characteristics of the technology and integration elements, not the cost and schedule values. This paper describes the application of SRL to a constrained resource optimization model to determine an optimal development plan that identifies which technologies and integration elements should be matured to which levels such that a specific level of system readiness is achieved by a certain time. This optimal plan can be used to monitor and evaluate the actual progress of the system?it can be the basis of a systems lifecycle maturity management approach called System Earned Readiness Management (SERM). A simple example is used to illustrate SERM. Presented at Annual Acquisition Research Symposium of the Naval Postgraduate School (6th) held in Monterey CA on 13-14 May 2009. Published in the Proceedings, v1: Defense Acquisiton in Transition, 22 April 2009.