Appendix I: Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

Our approach to developing this guide was to ascertain best practices from leading practitioners and to develop standard criteria to determine the extent agency programs and projects meet industry scheduling standards. Each best practice was developed and validated in consultation with a committee of cost estimating, scheduling, and earned value analysis specialists. These specialists meet at GAO headquarters semi-annually. The meetings are open to all with interest and expertise in cost estimating, schedule, and earned value management, as well as program managers and agency executives. Meeting members are from government agencies, private companies, independent consultant groups, trade industry groups, and academia from around the world. Agendas are sent to a mailing list of approximately 600 experts, and we receive feedback and discussion on agenda items through the meeting discussion and from telephone participants and email from members. Meeting minutes are extensively documented and archived.

Consistent with our methodology in the formulation of the GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide (GAO-09-3SP), we released a public exposure draft of the GAO Schedule Assessment Guide in May 2012 and sought input and feedback from all who were interested for 2 years. We vetted each comment we received on whether it was actionable, within scope, technically correct, and feasible. We received nearly 300 comments on the guide before we released it for public exposure and over 1,000 comments during the public exposure period. We received comments from the public, private companies, trade industry groups, and university researchers and extensive comments from government agencies and government working groups.

We compared the standards detailed in the guide with schedule standards and best practices other agencies and organizations had developed. We found that our standards are comparable to them, with limited exceptions. A comparison of our standards to other sets of standards is in appendix VII.

We conducted our work from November 2010 to November 2015 in accordance with all sections of GAO’s Quality Assurance Framework that are relevant to our objectives. The framework requires that we plan and perform the engagement to obtain sufficient and appropriate evidence to meet our stated objectives and to discuss any limitations in our work. We believe that the information and data obtained, and the analysis conducted, provide a reasonable basis for the guidance in this product.