Economic Analysis Lab

Noblis provides acquisition support, auditing support, capital asset planning, cost analysis, earned value management, financial analysis, and program management support to various government clients.

Government clients require independent government cost estimates (IGCEs) and schedule estimates to support systems acquisitions and budget plans. In addition, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requires the depart-ments to annually submit an OMB Circular A-11 Exhibit 300 Capital Asset Plan and Business Case for each major program in order to evaluate and grade the agency’s capital programming and investment decision making process. As part of its oversight role, OMB requires that the larger programs institute earned value analysis to manage program costs and schedule and to report program performance.

Purpose

The purpose of the Economic Analysis Laboratory is to provide a repository of specialized parametric cost estimating, schedule development, earned value, statistical and risk analysis, and integrated decision support tools.

Capabilities

Noblis analysts use the laboratory to access specialized cost estimating, schedule development, risk analysis, and decision analysis tools, including:

Software Development Cost Estimation

The laboratory contains three specialized proprietary parametric models for estimating the cost, staffing, and schedule for software application development projects and for creating information technology (IT) system life cycle cost models. These are industry-standard tools that are updated regularly in order to reflect state-of-the-art software engineering.

Risk Analysis

New OMB guidance directs agencies to use risk adjusted costs and to portray inherent schedule risk. The lab has a risk analysis tool suite for costs and schedule. The risk analysis tool set facilitates calculating and presenting risk through simulation and probability distributions. Risk analysis is also used in the analysis of pilot systems.

Decision Analysis

A set of decision support tools including advanced statistical analysis and distribution fitting.

Earned Value

The most widely used earned value tool used by contract and program managers for performance measurement of cost and schedule data.

Environmental Clean-up Costs

The Remedial Action Cost Engineering and Requirements (RACER) System is a specialized model for estimating and monitoring the life cycle costs and schedule of Department of Defense environmental clean-up projects.

Archive

Files of previous projects for analogous cost comparisons and the development of cost estimating relationships (CERs).

Library

Cost analysis, earned value, and federal acquisition and contracting books and training materials.

Current List of Tools
  • Parametric Cost Models for IT Systems
    • CostXpert
    • KnowledgePlan
    • PRICE-S
  • Decision Tools and Risk Analysis
    • @Risk
    • @Risk for MS Project
    • Risk View
    • Best Fit
    • Risk Optimizer
    • Top Rank
    • Precision Tree
  • Earned Value Analysis
    • wInsight
    • wInsight Administrator
  • Environmental Clean-up Cost Model
    • Remedial Action Cost Engineering & Requirements System (RACER)
  • Statistical Analysis
    • StatTools for EXCEL
  • Survey Creation and Analysis of Responses
    • Snap7 survey software