OSD Risk Management Initiative

In support of a USD(AT&L) Better Buying Power 3.0 initiative to Improve our Leaders’ Ability to Understand and Mitigate Technical Risk, DoD has collected a repository of risk-related case studies and lessons learned.  The repository establishes a place where acquisition leaders (Program Managers and Engineers) can find case studies and other documents that will help them better understand and mitigate technical risks.  By seeing how other programs have managed risks, our leaders should be better informed to anticipate possible adverse events and make better decisions to take cost effective steps ahead of time to limit their impact.

This repository will continue to grow as the Services institute mechanisms to generate new case studies and lessons learned. Thus far, this community has collected and categorized more than 175 case studies/lessons learned.   In the below MS Excel downloadable file ("Technical Risk Case Studies"), the documents are categorized into 13 areas of technical risk.  These 13 areas are: Requirements, Technology Maturation and Prototyping, Integration / Interoperability (includes Mission Integration), Manufacturing/Production, Software, Reliability-Availability-Maintainability, Verification/Validation, Architecture and Design, Schedule/Resources, Security/Cybersecurity, Management, Performance (system performance), and Sustainment. Users can access the spreadsheet and filter by the above 13 areas to find types of risk they are interested in.  The spreadsheet can also be filtered by domain and life cycle phase.  Each of the papers listed in the spreadsheet is accessible by the web link.