Software Engineering Institute

SEI Mission-Oriented Success Analysis and Improvement Criteria (MOSAIC) is a management approach for establishing and maintaining confidence that objectives will be achieved successfully. It comprises a suite of risk-based methods for assessing and managing complex projects and processes. The Mission Diagnostic Protocol (MDP) is one of the assessments included in MOSAIC. MDP provides a time-efficient means of analyzing the potential for success in complex and uncertain environments and can be applied across the life cycle and throughout the supply chain. It produces a broad overview of the current state of risk and opportunity for a project or process. With MDP, a set of key drivers is evaluated to establish current conditions and circumstances that can affect performance. Then, a simple algorithm is used to estimate the likelihood of achieving the objectives being pursued. An MDP assessment is straightforward to conduct, and it can be self-applied by people who are responsible for overseeing projects and processes. The purpose of this document is to describe the core set of activities and outputs that defines MDP.