Industry Comments Requested by GAO
US Government Accountability Office’s Readiness Assessment Guide has been made publicly available for comment:
GAO TECHNOLOGY READINESS ASSESSMENT GUIDE:
Best Practices for Evaluating the Readiness of Technology for Use in Acquisition Programs and Projects–Exposure Draft
From August 11, 2016 – August 10, 2017, GAO is seeking input and feedback on this Exposure Draft from all interested parties. Please click on this link https://tell.gao.gov/traguide to provide us with comments on the Guide.
Federal agencies spend billions of dollars each year to develop, acquire, and build major systems, facilities, and equipment, including fighter aircraft, nuclear waste treatment facilities, electronic baggage screening equipment, and telescopes for exploring the universe. Managing these complex acquisitions has been a long-standing challenge for federal agencies. Many of the governments most costly and complex acquisition efforts require the development of cutting-edge technologies and their integration into large and complex systems. Such acquisition efforts may also use existing technologies, but in new applications or environments.
For more than a decade, GAO has reported that using effective management practices and processes to assess how far a technology has matured and how it has been demonstrated are keys to evaluating its readiness to be integrated into a system and managed for risk in the federal government’s major acquisitions. A technology readiness assessment (TRA) is a systematic, evidence-based process that evaluates the maturity of hardware and software technologies critical to the performance of a larger system or the fulfillment of the key objectives of an acquisition program. TRAs, which measure the technical maturity of a technology or system at a specific point in time, do not eliminate technology risk, but when done well, can illuminate concerns and serve as the basis for realistic discussions on how to mitigate potential risks as programs move from the early stages of technology development, where resource requirements are relatively modest, to system development and beyond, where resource requirements are often substantial.