For DoD effort, this determination is made by the PL Project Officer and all other cases is made by a senior staff committee. This includes educational research proposals, Department of Defense funded efforts, as well as academic and commercial industry ventures. This aim is to ensure that the goals of the effort can be reached successfully.
All projects are unique.
Thus these procedures are a guide to development. The first consists of four steps to develop as complete an understanding as is reasonable, defining realistic goals for the project and estimating the resources required for completion. The four steps in phase one are Preliminary Design, Analysis of Effort, Demonstration, and Market Analysis. The first phase ends with a recommendation on how to proceed and an understanding by all parties of the resource commitments require, including costs. Phase two, then, is the real work period where the code development, algorithm implementation, and production runs take place.