Incorporating Maturity Assessment into Quality Functional Deployment for Improved Decision Support Analysis , Risk Management , and Defense Acquisition

Technology maturity assessment metrics have played a key role in complex system acquisition and technology integration in both the defense and commercial sector. Of these, the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Technology Readiness Level (TRL) has been the de facto standard since it’s inception in the late 1990s. DoD adopted the use of TRLs to provide program managers with critical information on component technology maturity and overall system insertion readiness. However, with the recent increase in system complexity and interface interoperability, TRLs have begun to show limitations in their ability to meet these stated objectives. Furthermore, there is no effective technique, tool, or procedure that incorporates maturity assessment in the design or development phase of a product lifecycle. To address the above concerns, this paper presents a model that incorporates maturity assessment into an industry standard technique known as the House of Quality (HoQ). HoQ is an established analytical methodology that translates customer requirements to engineering capabilities and ultimately provides a method for requirement tracking and resource allocation. An improved model shall enable the program manager to integrate several inherent systems engineering functions into a standalone-streamlined process.