DRM Associate’s Program Assessment methodology is used to benchmark and assess your program’s development process against 180 best practices for integrated product and process development (IPPD). This assessment serves as a benchmark and identifies the highest impact opportunities for further improvement. This overall methodology is described in Benchmarking Best Practices to Improve Product Development. The assessment would typically take two to four weeks depending upon the program’s size and the complexity of the development process. Prior to conducting the assessment, we would review your program’s organization chart and any other descriptive material you provide and discuss your program by phone. Based on this, we would typically conduct five to fifteen days of interviews, walk-through’s, and process reviews. The reviews can cover not only the contractor’s organization, but also the program acquisition organization and major subcontractor and partners. Eighteen assessment categories are addressed:
At the conclusion of this review, we will sit down with you and other members of your program management team to offer specific recommendations as well as debrief you using our assessment forms. Where necessary, we would explain certain IPPD concepts to your program management team so that they would understand why a recommended improvement was appropriate. We can discuss priorities based on gap analysis (weak rating versus a strong importance of the dimension), dimensions that seem out of balance, and our experience. We can then help develop a preliminary action plan to “close the gap” and improve in areas related to the program’s critical success factors. We will leave a copy of our Integrated Product and Process Development Program Assessment software with you so that you can perform on-going self-assessments in the future. Training in this benchmarking and assessment methodology is also available.
This feedback can identify specific opportunities to improve the development process and can result in significant reductions in development/modification costs, product costs, and engineering changes as well as improved product quality and program performance. This assessment and the subsequent improvement efforts can pay for themselves many times over.