Decision Point is a model based on process improvement for DoD organizations involved in Research & Development. Its purpose is to support those organizations’ efforts to develop and transition technologies to the warfighter, usually through a managed transition into a system under development by a program of record. The Decision Point model draws heavily from several principles including Stage-Gate processes, a System Engineering approach to development, and an incremental approach to technology transition.

A suite of tools are being developed to streamline and automate some aspects of the process model. A System Engineering module has been developed which prescribes checklists of Decision Point activities and document repositories to manage the maturation process of developing a technology based on the Technology Readiness Levels adopted by OSD.

Frequently, the process of developing technologies, particularly in the government contracting arena, includes the process of developing and letting contracts (including economy act actions). As such, Decision Point v3 includes a module to support the business operations aspects of technology project management.

These tools utilize a robust COTS environment as the managing infrastructure (Microsoft SharePoint 2010) and share a common set of client-side-only code libraries to minimize the Information Assurance risks and simplify security auditing and review of the code base. This provides the most portable solution and ensures simplified customization for use by different organizations and agencies. USASMDC/ARSTRAT is the Configuration Management organization responsible for maintenance and control over the common code base.

Decision Point may be implemented by an organization manually, or with one or more of these tools. Each tool is independent of the other. Together, they make up the Decision Point v3 Project Management Toolkit. These tools are likely to require code changes to adapt them to the implementing organization. Efforts have been taken to minimize the amount of code change needed, however. We believe this approach is superior to a “one size fits all” approach and ultimately provides greater scalability and value to the government.