Advanced Weapons Lab

The US Navy maintains and upgrades fighter and attack aircraft, as well as aircraft for several other ally countries. The combined fleet is surprisingly diverse, and multiple, unique configurations are represented across the variant and country-specific platforms.

The Navy is responsible for the entire lifecycle of modifications to these aircraft, including planning, estimating, research & development, design, implementation, testing, and delivery back to the fleet. Several hundred such efforts are in progress at any given time and are spread across multiple, independently-grouped deployments involving integrated software/hardware solutions.

Planning the resources and costs for these efforts involves coordinating input from multiple customers, multiple vendors, and an in-house staff of government engineers and specialists. Prior to CTA’s involvement, tasks were estimated using hundreds of Excel files stored on a common network drive. These files were notoriously difficult to maintain and aggregating cost data across the set took several weeks in some cases.

The process for estimating the resources required to perform these efforts was inconsistent and loosely defined, and changes to resource rates required cumbersome, time-consuming, and infrequently executed file updates, all of which resulted in a high degree of variability in cost estimates from effort to effort and inaccurate budget plans.