ABSTRACT
In today’s global business environment, engineers, information technology professionals and practitioners, and other related product development professionals integrate hardware, software, people, and interfaces to produce economically viable and innovative applications while ensuring that all pieces of the enterprise are working together. No products or services are immune from cost, performance, schedule, quality, risks, and tradeoffs. Yet engineers spend most of their formal education focused on performance and most of their professional careers worrying about resources and schedules. Too often they become fixated on the technical performance to meet the customer’s expectations without worrying about the downstream costs that contribute to the total life cycle costs (LCC) of a system. Unfortunately, in many cases the LCC or total ownership costs (TOC) are ignored because either the total costs would make the project untenable (especially for large government projects) or the increased acquisition costs needed to reduce the LCC would make the project unacceptable.
