...available in the program management community on how to integrate these measures into meaningful measure of the system's overall performance risk. This paper presents how individual TPMs may be combined to measure and monitor the overall performance risk of a system. The approach consists of integrating individual technical performance measures in a way that produces an overall risk index. The computed index shows the degree of performance risk presently in the system. It identifies risk-driving TPMs, enables monitoring time-history trends, and reveals where management should target strategies to lessen or eliminate the performance risks of the system.

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As a system evolves through its acquisition and deployment phases, management defines and derives measures that indicate how well the system is achieving its performance requirements. These measures are known as Technical Performance Measures (TPMs) (Blanchard & Fabrycky, 1990; Department of Defense [DoD], 2002). Measures such as Weight, Mean-lime-Between-Failure, and Detection Accuracy are among the types of TPMs often defined on programs. Technical performance measurements can be taken from a variety of sources. This includes data from system testing, system simulations, and experimentation. Depending on the source basis for these data, and the development phase of the system, performance data may be derived from a mix of actual or forecasted values.

The program management community has little in the way of methodology for quantifying performance risk as a function of a system's individual technical performance measures. The approach presented herein consists of computing a risk index derived from these individual performance measurements. The index shows the degree of performance risk presently in the system, supports identifying risk-driving TPMs, and can reveal where management should focus on improving technical performance and, thereby, lessen risk. When the index is continuously updated, management can monitor the time-history trend of its value. This enables management to assess the effectiveness of risk reduction actions being targeted or achieved over time.

In general, TPMs are measures that, when evaluated over time, must either decrease to meet a system's performance requirements or increase to meet performance requirements. Thus, each TPM can be assigned to one of two categories. For this paper, define Category A as the collection of TPMs whose values must decrease to achieve a system's threshold performance requirements. Define Category B as the collection of TPMs whose values must increase to achieve a system's threshold performance requirements. This is illustrated in Figure 1.

In Figure 1, the horizontal axis represents measurement date. This is the date when the actual or forecasted value of the TPM was taken or derived. The vertical axis represents the value of the TPM at the corresponding measurement date. In Figure 1, [V.sub.thres] denotes the threshold performance value for the TPM. This is the minimum acceptable value for the TPM. It marks the boundary between the regions of acceptable versus unacceptable performance risk.

It is assumed that TPMs defined for a system are done judiciously; that is, only those TPMs truly needed to properly measure a system's overall technical performance are defined, measured, and monitored. Given this, acceptable performance risk can be defined as the condition when all TPMs reach, or extend beyond, their individual threshold performance values. Conversely, unacceptable performance risk can be defined as the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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