Earned readiness management for scheduling, monitoring and evaluating the development of complex product systems

• Maturity-focused methodology for evaluating complex system development.
• Developed a methodology called Earned Readiness Management (ERM).
• Practitioners need a control mechanism for complex product systems development.
• ERM is a tool to schedule, monitor and evaluate complex product systems.

How should the development of a complex product system (CPS) be managed in a manner that focuses on process milestones, which is responsive to changes in technology and requirements; based on maturity measures; and applied in an interactive manner, in addition to facilitating timely feedback? This is considered to be an important question in project management. Project management tools and techniques have been inadequate for monitoring technology development in a CPS. If the technologies are not properly matured by a specific period of time, the progress of the project can be in detriment. To address this important gap, the objective of this study is to develop a new maturity-focused methodology for scheduling, monitoring and evaluating the development of a system. We present Earned Readiness Management (ERM) for system scheduling, monitoring and evaluation which was developed and validated using a case study. Future research on ERM is also discussed in this paper.