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4.5.1 An Application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process to Systems Engineering and Project Management
Author(s) -
Fisher Gerard H.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
incose international symposium
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2334-5837
DOI - 10.1002/j.2334-5837.1998.tb00094.x
Subject(s) - analytic hierarchy process , government (linguistics) , quality (philosophy) , process (computing) , mandate , corporation , engineering management , competition (biology) , process management , computer science , engineering , business , operations research , finance , philosophy , linguistics , epistemology , law , political science , operating system , ecology , biology
Declining federal budgets and pressures from other companies are causing an increase in the competition for a decreasing number of government contracts. The world is exploding with new applications for desktop workstations, even in the military environment. The information technology field emerged with little discipline in either hardware or software development. Improvement was encouraged through the introduction of government quality initiatives and a 1995 U.S. congressional mandate limiting awards of new government contracts to those companies with a record of good past performance. Poor performance on a single contract can take a company out of competition for up to five years! This adds urgency to improving a company's performance on existing contracts. To ensure customer satisfaction, high quality products, and a profitable relationship, a company needs to make an early identification of potential problems and take corrective actions before they impact the customer. To this end, the author developed an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model which identifies project problems early enough to take corrective action. AHP permits multiattribute evaluation of economic data, other numeric factors and subjective factors and yields a single figure of merit. This project applied the systems engineering process to the development and implementation of this AHP model. The model synthesized the expert knowledge of five experienced systems engineers and project managers to develop the weighting of the various elements of the model. The model was built to use the existing executive information system being used by a moderately‐sized corporation's executive officers and is easily transferable to other organizations. It is a new way to interpret the data. The results, based on nine months of data collection and analysis for 152 projects, indicate that project performance can be predicted based on current data collected.