1. Post-Award Activity: You bid the program with a total budget of $26 millionincluding a $2 million management reserve and a BAC of $24 million to be completed in 12 months. Although we know the expenditures will not be linear, let's assume a straight-line relationship between time and budget for this exercise. At month 5 we find we should be at $10 million (BCWS) (straight-line plan of $2 million spent each month * 5 months), we have completed enough work to justify an expenditure of $8 million (BCWP) and our actual costs accrued to date are $7 million. (ACWP)
1. Outline what you believe the current status of the project is and interpret what the projections mean to you. Using only this cost data, how can you project time to complete?
2. Outline what you believe the action plan should be to bring this project in on-schedule, on-budget and meet the customer requirements.
2. Understanding Total Cost of Quality and Risk: System Engineers are constantly trying to balance the cost of prevention and appraisal with the risk of failure. Please review the TASER Total Cost of Quality article, found in the ASQ magazine - starting on page 13- (eighth article from the bottom in the Course Documents folder), and use this as a reference:
a. You have considered your repair organization as a profit center in the past. Please develop a compelling argument on why TASER should invest more in prevention and appraisal.
b. Assuming you win the argument above, develop a detailed outline of how you would make this transition. What are the logical steps to success?
3. BPMN: This modern modeling technique from OMG can have significant impacts on all aspects of Systems Engineering:
a. In your opinion what are these Systems Engineering implications as we attempt to migrate to the Model-based Enterprise?
b. If BPMN AND BPEL ultimately do what is projected they can do, what will be the Systems Engineering implications on:
i. Requirements Definition, Requirements Capture and Requirements Creep?
ii. Configuration Management?
iii. Project Management?
iv. Risk Management?
4. Predicting Costs: The Knox predictive model shows that the more rigor an organization has (increased SEI level), the lower the total cost of the system development.
a. CoCoMo and CoSysMo take this into account in subtle ways. Please review the CoCoMo and CoSysMo methodologies and comment on how "Rigor ~ e.g. increased SEI level", is factored into the calculations. Do this ONLY from a qualitative viewpoint ~ I do NOT expect that you do this from a quantitative viewpoint nor do I expect that you show the quantitative effects of this. I am seeking a qualitative "where is rigor factored into the concepts" rather than into the equations here!
b. In CoSysMo we use the factor "A" - the calibration constant. How would you develop a verified and validated "A"?
5. Mitigating Risk:We addressed the pressure cooker FMEA exercise in class. There are various ways of mitigating risks such as: adding redundancies, reducing the impact, reducing the probability, pushing the risk to someone else, etc.As a Systems Engineer how do you propose to create an "excellent" solution for the pressure cooker risks we encountered from two perspectives? Here I am not looking for solutions, I am looking for the Systems Engineering process.
a. A Technical Perspective
b. A Business Perspective