Business Commons^™

Relating Initial Budget To Program Growth With Rayleigh And Weibull Models, Eric J. Unger

Theses and Dissertations

Previous research on completed defense R&D shows that contract expenditures can be fit well with a Rayleigh model. With fixed outlay rates, as prescribed by the OSD comptroller, the budget profile must have most of the funds in the early years to produce Rayleigh-distributed expenditures. R&D programs with more delayed funding profiles may also produce expenditures that a Rayleigh model fits through schedule slips and cost overruns. This research tests how well the initial funding profile produces Rayleigh-distributed expenditures that can be related to the program's final cost overrun and schedule slips. Based only on the initial budget profile, we …