Raj Raman

Analyzes the nation's aeronautic testing needs and the effectiveness of and management issues for, NASA's major wind tunnel and test propulsion facilities in serving those needs. The National Aeronautics and Space Adrninistration's (NASA's) wind tunnel and propulsion test facilities continue to be important to U. S. competitiveness across the military, commercial, and space sectors. Unfortunately, managemen tissues are creating real risks to these facilities. NASA needs to develop an aeronautics test technology vision and plan; analyze the viability of a national test facility plan; identify and maintain its minimum set of facilities; and identify financial shared support to keep its underutilized but essential facilities from entering financial collapse.

"Running out of cash" and "not the right team" are amongst the top three reasons for start-up failures. A quick look down the line of reasons shows that the causes are very often related to execution and not the idea itself It is not so much just the idea being non-scalable and of commercial value, but also about pragmatic business processes and leadership, which sets apart the successful enterprises that emerge from the fragile start-up ecosystem. 'Scaling Start-ups - The Challenges, Pitfalls and Strategies' takes a very insightful look at all such potential errors and offers simple, pithy and pragmatic options of identifying them, successfully avoiding them, and possible ways of addressing them to significantly increase the probability of success. It aims to enable promoters, founders, entrepreneurs and the fledging teams, to better appreciate and deal with the nuances of the environment realities, organization building, business management, leadership conundrums, regulatory strictures, capital raising and personal development. All this, presented in a simple, short and succinct manner, makes it an engrossing read

Contrary to widespread perceptions, program office personnel do not spend inordinate amounts of time on statutory and regulatory compliance activities. Further, the authors could not identify any areas in which policy change or streamlining implementation would save significant dollars in program management funds, reduce personnel, or improve program outcomes.

The Fleet Response Plan is a U. S. Navy program to enhance the operational availability of the aircraft carrier fleet. This report describes program modeling that varies the time between depot availabilities and the size of the depot work packages, to estimate its effect on the maintenance industrial base and the operational availability of the aircraft carrier fleet.

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics asked RAND to evaluate the cost of compliance with acquisition-related statutes and regulations at the program office level. This report identifies the areas considered most burdensome and describes the study's methodology, focus, and data collection process, including the development of a Web-based data collection tool for use by program office personnel.

To achieve a more responsive and more readily deployable fleet of surface combatants, the Navy adopted the Fleet Response Plan (FRP) in 2003 to replace its traditional two-year ship maintenance cycle. The authors of this report look at the effects the FRP has had thus far and determine whether maintenance resources are meeting maintenance demands and whether related industry resources have been coordinated effectively.