Establishing a program for applying earned value metrics to flight test

Improving efficiency and decreasing costs are becoming more important as the pressure to procure aircraft weapons systems more quickly and at a lower cost increases. The current tool of choice for tracking program efficiency is Earned Value Management (EVM), which provides indices of cost and schedule performance against an agreed upon baseline for task completion. This paper discusses methods that will be used by the H-l Upgrades Flight Test Team to implement an EVM scheme to track the efficiency of the flight test program. We define EVM, discuss, compare the merits of existing metrics for flight test, and propose a database management approach. Bounding the problem and expected metrics are discussed. Finally, we present a methodology for uniformly planning for contingencies and unknowns so as to permit success to be declared within a work package even in the face of technical challenges