Quaternion Consulting

The QCI team provides critical expertise and credible technical leadership that are able to understand and communicate effectively in the language of cost analysis. Our analysis considers both the business and the technical needs of our customers with the goal of providing a quality product that meets the user needs. Our process is proven at all levels of detail, enabling flexibility in products tailored to mission needs. QCI has experience in analysis and prediction of risks at the box and subsystem level all the way up to the enterprise level system-of-systems and portfolio analysis. We have collected and normalized system acquisition data, and developed methods and models to predict the cost, risks, schedule, and possible growth. To this end, we have participated in the development of cost reporting standards and policy development for cost reporting across the IC. Our team has the technical background needed to develop and analyze costs and risks using multiple methods to include analogy, parametric, bottoms-up, and level of effort assessments. We understand the statistics behind the parametric and engineering approaches to develop risk-adjusted scenarios and probability density functions to describe the risks. QCI provides cost analysis products and support to develop life cycle cost estimates, formulate budgets, estimate program schedules, assess the validity of existing budgets and proposals, and conduct risk and sensitivity analysis. QCI's staff delivers high quality Independent Cost Estimates, Analyses of Alternatives, Architectural Trade Studies, Business Case Analysis, Portfolio Analysis, responses to Congressionally Directed Actions, and budgetary drills that are accepted by the senior leadership in the Intelligence Community. We also provide an independent technical assessment to strengthen cost analysis products by assessing system acquisition strategies and integrating cost and technical risk assessments. One of the most valued skills demonstrated by the QCI team is the ability to effectively produce quality estimates of varying degrees of fidelity based on time-criticality, data availability and estimate function. QCI expertise extends to methods and model development. We conduct research, develop cost models and collect and normalize cost, technical, and schedule data collection and statistical analysis resulting in cost estimating relationship (CERs)/schedule estimating relationships (SERs) for use in cost modeling. Our developed models contributed to award-winning projects, providing cutting-edge analysis unmatched in the industry.