Applications of a Parsimonious Model of Development Programs’ Costs and Schedules

Abstract

A model of the cost and schedule of a development program, characterized by three non-dimensional parameters, gives means for estimating the cost and schedule impacts of constraining funding below planned levels, as well as for assessing the realism of the costs and schedules of planned programs. In contrast to models of the Norden-Rayleigh-Weibull class, the model explicitly considers specific components of cost, and captures the distinction between a development program’s value (i.e., the things delivered) and its cost (i.e., the money paid to acquire the value). Treating staff levels, staff productivity and cost, overhead, purchased material costs, and the burdens imposed by staff coordination and by allocating a program’s effort to individual workers or teams and collating the results, the model reflects effects of management actions to make programs optimal by such criteria as minimal cost, minimal time, or minimal cost subject to a maximum-time constraint.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge our appreciation for a suggestion of the Director’s that led to the application of assessing realism of cost-schedule plans. Responsibility for the article’s statements and conclusions is of course ours, not of either PARCA or its Director.

Notes

1. To keep the example simple, we assume that each year’s outlays go to a single task, and that the task for each year must be completed before work can begin on the following year’s task. Modifications of the example’s procedure can enable relaxing both assumptions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Lee

Dr. David Lee is a retired applied mathematician. He was Director of the Applied Mathematics Laboratory in the old U. S. Air Force Research Laboratories, Professor of Applied Mathematics and Head, Department of Mathematics, in the Air Force Institute of Technology, Director of the Operations Research/Procurement Planning Division in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Program Analysis and Evaluation, and Senior Research Fellow in the Logistics Management Institute. He is author or co-author of many archival articles, and author of “The Cost Analyst’s Companion.”

Carol Dezwarte

Carol Dezwarte offers a program and project management, supply chain, and simulation and modeling background. She has over 15 years’ experience that ranges from developing and coding a simulation model to predict airspace collision potential to managing implementation of a new certification program in the U.S. Pentagon for 15,000 Army users. Ms. Dezwarte is utilized for client management, program and project leadership, research analytics, and technical expertise. She has experience with numerous defense and federal organizations, including the U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, DLA, NASA, and DOT&E. She has a B.S., cum laude, in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University and an M.S. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Georgia Tech.

Stephanie Sigalas-Markham

Stephanie Sigalas-Markham is a research and analytics engineer at the Raymond Corporation. Previously, she worked as a math modeler at LMI, supporting the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) Weapon System Sustainment Program (WSSP) and Research and Development for Supply Support (RDSS). She has 5 years’ experience analyzing and altering inventory simulation and mathematical optimization models for government and defense agencies. She has provided research support for an array of projects, primarily focusing on inventory management for the Department of Defense. Stephanie Sigalas-Markham has a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the Georgia Institute of Technology (2009), and a M.Sc. in Operations Research and Management Science from the George Washington University (2012).

Jeremy Eckhause

Dr. Jeremy Eckhause is an Operations Researcher at the RAND Corporation. He has over 15 years’ experience developing mathematical optimization and simulation models for transportation, government and defense agencies and services. Prior to joining RAND in January 2014, he was a member of the research staff at the Logistics Management Institute (LMI), where he was a project leader for several multi-year projects supporting various U.S. government agencies. His focus areas include transportation modeling, resource allocation, military logistics, probabilistic air campaign modeling, public-sector investment under technological uncertainty, and cost analysis. He has produced original research that has been published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at numerous conferences. He has been an invited lecturer at the IFP School in Rueil-Malmaison, France and the German Institute of Economic Research in Berlin. Dr. Eckhause has a B.A. in Mathematics from University of Pennsylvania, an M.S.E. in Operations Research from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from University of Maryland, College Park.