ABSTRACT
The customer’s ultimate requirement is their need, a simple sentence or paragraph that succinctly describes the needed product in terms of its effect on other systems, the environment, or both. This need may be stated by a Department of Defense (DoD) customer as a new threat that must be defeated, an ordnance transportation and/or delivery demand, or an undersea war ghting capability, for example. It may also be phrased by a commercial concern about their hoped-for customers. On the surface, it would appear that the fundamental difference here is that the commercial company must understand its customer base and their needs well enough to know what will sell whereas the military contractor is told what is needed by their customer in a request for proposal (RFP). Actually, every healthy DoD contractor is in the same boat with the commercial companies and must be constantly examining marketing possibilities, developing new ideas that their customer base may nd useful, and studying their customer’s current situation and potential needs. Also, the DoD contractor must increasingly work to understand all of the stakeholders for a given system, possibly even extending to the population at large. While the planning methods discussed here can be used for any program, the DoD will be used as an example throughout this chapter.
