For years, organizations such as the government, have been trying to improve product and system reliability by specifying MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) as a TPM (Technical Performance Measure). Yet, looking at papers and presentations from NASA on Ultra Reliability and ATRIP (Army Transformation Reliability Improvement Program) from the Army [1], system reliability has been declining. More and more systems are not meeting their reliability goals. As an alternative approach, government contract officers need to follow the lead of the medical community and change behaviors as soon as possible on how to obtain improved equipment life expectancy along with all of the benefits that go along with good, reliable, equipment. The government equipment procurers need to say in the contract what they want done in the SOW (Statement Of Work) that would lead to more reliable products along with less risky development programs. The purpose of this paper is to show that the commercial practice of using the SOW for specifying good design practices leads to good reliability as a byproduct and that using the SOW methodology works and that it is a much better approach than only specifying MTBF as TPM.
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