RAYTHEON BRINGS EO TECHNOLOGY To Defend Our Nation

Engineering for Raytheon’s Intelligence and
Information Systems business. Major Nielsen
particularly enjoyed this year’s conference.
“As a newcomer to this community, I find
the level of energy really exciting. I think
this [conference] helps show the common
problems across the industry base, [and]
enables a company like Raytheon to understand
the issues that other companies have
and how they may have solved them. No
one company has all the answers and good
companies understand that.” Grimm spoke
on the role of CMMI in Mission Assurance.
“We need to get out and talk to our customers
to see what the requirements are in
each of the businesses and not just automatically
jump over the horse. Mission
Assurance is associated with CMMI in that
it gives us a strong base. If we’re at maturity
level 3 or 5 in CMMI, we’re getting very
close to having the kind of base we need to
have in Mission Assurance.” He also saw
the value in seeing people talk together
and discuss real issues. “The panel discussions
are a catalyst to get ideas to the forefront
of everybody’s minds. These kinds of
gatherings make people really start to
exchange ideas and solve real problems.”
More than 30 Raytheon employees from
across the company attended the conference,
including 12 CMMI experts who presented
more than 15 papers and tutorials.
Raytheon was well represented by earning
four “Best Paper” awards, including “Best
Overall Paper” by Donna Freed on
Raytheon ROI and Benefits for Achieving
CMMI Level 5. Freed also won “Best Paper”
for another presentation, as did fellow
employees Tom Lienhard, Timothy Davis
and Melissa Olson. For a complete list of
papers and tutorials presented at this year’s
event, go to http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2004
cmmi/2004cmmi.html.
John Evers, Raytheon Engineering Common
Program, CMMI and Integrated Product
Development System project manager,
summed up his thoughts about the conference
and on Mission Assurance by saying,
“The most valuable thing is seeing where
other companies are, including our competitors,
[and] seeing where we’re at as a
company. We had a lot of presentations
here which is great. We got the word out
on what we’ve been doing, but we also
know we have more to do. We’ve got a lot
of sites at CMMI Level 3, but that’s just part
of it. We really want to get to where this is
part of what we’re doing, continuously
improving our processes: how we use them
and how we execute them on projects. One
of the key things in Mission Assurance is
that it’s strongly related to CMMI. By
improving how we stand against CMMI as
an appraisal model, we get better in executing
our job and delivering products and
services that our customers need.”
The CMMI project is a cooperative effort
of the DoD, industry and the Software
Engineering Institute to develop an integrated
Capability Maturity Model that
encompasses systems engineering, software
engineering, integrated product and
process development and supplier sourcing.
Its purpose is to provide for improvements
in cost, schedule and overall quality of programs
in engineering development and production
by causing integration of the various
engineering and related disciplines.
For more information about CMMI at
Raytheon, visit http://cmmi.ray.com/cmmi.•
Bob Rassa is a
director of system
supportability for
Raytheon Space and
Airborne Systems in El
Segundo, Calif. During
the past 10 years he
has focused on working
with customers to make Raytheon products
easier to support through systems engineering.
Rassa founded and chaired the National
Defense Industrial Association’s (NDIA) systems
engineering (SE) division, partnering with Mark
Schaeffer from the Department of Defense (DoD),
who had recently established a new systems
engineering department within the office of the
Under Secretary of Defense, Acquisition
Technology & Logistics.
This defense-industry partnership led to the
integration of significant capability maturity
models — specifically SW-CMM and SECM —
with IPD-CMM, which eventually became
known as Capability Maturity Model
Integration or CMMI, an idea borne from
napkin doodlings among Schaeffer, Dr. Art
Pyster (then with the Software Productivity
Consortium) and Roger Bate of the Software
Engineering Institute. With Rassa’s validation,
NDIA became the industry sponsor of CMMI,
with Schaeffer as the DoD counterpart.
“What CMMI promised, it has been delivering:
substantial adoption within the commercial
and defense industries, and outstanding return
on investment being reported in terms of
improved cost performance index and schedule
performance index, reduced delivered defects
and quicker development time,” explains
Rassa. The group also wrote the CMMI
Acquisition Module (CMMI-AM) to improve
government program offices’ performance
and facilitate their engagement as industry
adopts CMMI.
Continued on page 29
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