Ready to Design a Naval Ship? – Prove It!

Last year, the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) sponsored the Navy's Center for Innovation in Ship Design (CISD) to establish a framework for developing ship design capability readiness levels as part of a business case to provide incentives for the naval ship enterprise to invest in developing, sustaining, and improving mature naval ship design capabilities. The authors describe the accomplishments thus far and note that there is now enough documentation that new ship acquisition programs can specify design readiness requirements and have valid criteria for evaluating the design capabilities of contractors proposing to perform early stage naval ship design. They actually apply the framework to NAVSEA and assess NAVSEA's readiness to design a naval ship. Although significant progress is being made on developing Ship Design Capability Readiness Models (SDCRM), much work remains to be done!