The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering has released a contractors’ guide on providing better reliability and maintainability—or R&M—estimates for Department of Defense programs.
The guidance incorporates inputs and reviews from participants in the DOD-Industry R&M Engineering Roundtable in the 2024 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, known as RAMS, OUSD R&E said in a LinkedIn post last week. It added that the guidebook, titled “Best Practices to Achieve Better Reliability and Maintainability Estimates for DoD Systems,” leads a planned guidance series for 2025 to address the major R&M challenges identified during the RAMS roundtable discussions.
Bridging Gaps in Estimates
The 64-page document aims to address systems unmatched to user needs, unreliable for mission requirements and are costly to maintain. The guidance supports DOD programs through improved R&M estimates narrowing the gaps between system acquisition figures and their achieved R&M levels. It also seeks to ensure better estimates that improve forecasts on operating and support costs and mission effectiveness.
The best practices outlined in the guide include current estimation methods addressing differences in system lifecycles, such as developmental test and evaluation, operational test and evaluation and fielding. The recommended approaches also address differences between user needs and design requirements.
In addition, the guidance provides specific use cases of estimate combination in system developments that call for or open the possibility of using one reliability estimation methods for some items and another approach for others.
A Pipeline of DOD Guidance
Another OUSD R&E guide will be published for additional recommendations on performing R&M estimates at specific points in the acquisition cycle, such as concept development and operational test and evaluation.
The office released last week a guidebook on the development of requests for proposals through the modular open systems approach promoting DOD’s acquisition strategy.
In January, OUSD R&E also released a Mission Architecture Style Guide to help model-based systems engineers and architects in developing, presenting and analyzing model-based mission architectures. The guidance also aims at minimizing duplication of efforts, while promoting collaboration in the development of authoritative joint models for analyzing advanced technology concepts and missions across the DOD.
