Preventing Expensive Electronic Hardware Mistakes.

• Author: Carlson, Steve
• Position: Viewpoint

* "Management reserve" is a common term for all Defense Department and defense industrial base program managers. As a program execution management system is constructed, experienced subject matter experts are consulted to assess risk. This risk assessment is based on experience from previous programs. As a rule, the higher the risk, the higher the management reserve.

Despite all this careful planning, expensive hardware mistakes are common. The reasons are simple. First, all defense acquisition programs are incorporating new technologies that have not been fully vetted. Second, the "lessons learned" from the past acquisition programs are forgotten the moment the platform meets initial operating capability.

There is almost a quiet resignation within the Defense Department on the inevitability of acquisition program cost and schedule overruns. And the "guardians of the status quo" are all too glad to initiate a "blame game," focusing on the narrative that a science-and-technology program has "failed."

They ignore the fact that firm, fixed-price commercial product development is common. Even when the benchmarks of today's commercial products are pointed out to these guardians, they wrongfully state that these practices cannot be adopted to "sophisticated" defense platforms.

Fortunately, the department and Congress agree that adopting the commercial best practices that lead to first-pass success are totally reasonable expectations to have in defense systems as well. Steps are being taken to implement these practices, rightfully under the management of the newly formed undersecretary of defense for research and engineering.

The good news is that techniques exist today to address the technology that is the root cause of the majority of defense electronic program acquisition delays. Studying and adopting the commercial electronics best practices of "emulate before you fabricate" will not only result in first-pass success, but also "future-proofed"--in other words, sustainable and modernizable--electronic systems that are verified with real metrics.

The commercial electronics industry has developed a methodology that directly addresses the drawbacks of historical approaches. The Cadence system prototyping methodology introduces an emulation and analysis step, as well as an explicit go/no-go step prior to committing an idea to a physical prototyping step.

By using the system prototyping methodology and metric-driven verification, the Defense...