It is sometimes necessary for a Project/Technology Manager to justify continued investment in the project to Program management or other decision makers.

PM’s need to supply the data needed to provide visibility into technical progress and reinforce recommendations for continued investment.

Tools like Decision Point give a great resource to project managers looking to show their progress towards a TRL level, as well as documentation to support their progress.

Methodologies like Decision Point provide Tools that:

• Shows the technical progress towards a TRL level.
• Presents documentation to support the traceability to customer requirements.
• Gives detailed metrics reports to summarize their risk at any given point in the project development process.
• Documents user/sponsor interest with predefined and agreed-to Technology Transition Agreements (TTAs) to demonstrate that your project fulfills a specific need to a warfighter.

• Identify sources of requirements.
• Quantify the impact (i.e. significance) of the project on the need.
• Have a rough idea of the lifecycle of the project relative to a capability (TRL Roadmap).
• Be prepared to compare the Project under consideration with any others that may be competing with it for the niche in the portfolio.
• Have a rough estimate of the current Maturity Phase budget estimate (not just the current FY estimate).
• Complete/Update the Project Metrics data.

Budget defense is often necessary when the Portfolio or Project Manager is challenged to justify their project on the basis of its technical feasibility, viability, and practicality. The Decision Point Metrics are one of the best tools with which to gather the appropriate data and build the case for budget defense:

• The Technology Advancement Degree of Difficulty (TAD²) measures the complexity and assigns risk based on difficulty.
• The Risk measure tells the decision maker whether there is a preponderance of risk that remains unmitigated or conversely, whether the identified Risks have been properly anticipated and that there is a plan in place to manage them.
• The time identified remaining to the "Next TRL" provides another factor that adds weight to an investment decision when "time-to-market" is the of higher critical need.
• Similarly, when the TRL Roadmap metric is developed and scored, then the decision maker can be confident that the plan and path to transition for development has been considered and the termination or duration for the Project lifecycle is known.
• Adding to the roadmap to transition, the metric that tracks the initiation and specific level of the Technology Transition Agreement (TTA) signifies the level of commitment that crosses the "valley of death" when the project that was being "pushed" changes status to being "pulled" by a Program Office or other certified acquisition authority.
• Cataloging the Phase Cost (which is the remaining cost attributed to the current phase of technology development) is particularly relevant when the key decision point is cost to projected performance
• One of the most significant factors in support of investing in a Project effort is found in the Measure of Effectiveness (MoE) metric that identifies the amount of coverage as a measure against the current capability solution that a successful pursuit of the technology would fulfill. In many cases, the technology promises a greater than 100% improvement over the existing solution.
• Correlating closely with MoE, the Requirements Trace metric identifies the level of formality existing in the traceability back to a documented user-based capability need. Having your technology directly traced to meeting or addressing such a need, greatly enhances the project's desirability.

Armed with the data resulting from metrics collection, the PM can be in a better position to argue to negotiate for budget dollars.