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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2004

Results of a NASA Kennedy Space Center Earned Value Management Pilot Project

The Earn Value Management Pilot provided a tremendous amount of data on the strengths and weaknesses of the new financial system, the ability to support EVM from many viewpoints, the lack of tools for small to medium projects implementing EVM, and the training and environment necessary to successfully deploy EVM to all projects. This data along with other pilots will prove invaluable. Deploying EVM should not be taken lightly - a full assessment of capabilities and supporting infrastructure should be done prior to any deployment, and some very basic questions should be asked. For instance, will sufficient training be provided? Can the project managers readily and easily obtain all the necessary data? If EVM is to thrive in all projects regardless of cost, the transition should be as seamless as possible, minimizing cost and effort, and with the end user in mind. In setting up an EVM implementation, the question, "How does the project manager benefit from this process?" must remain at the forefront. Further research in this area is needed to answer the question,"Is EVM cost effective in small projects?" The authors welcome knowledge sharing with other organizations that are striving to gain the benefits of EVM on small projects.

Delgado, Hector N.↗
NASA NTRS1997

Risk Management of NASA Projects

Various NASA Langley Research Center and other center projects were attempted for analysis to obtain historical data comparing pre-phase A study and the final outcome for each project. This attempt, however, was abandoned once it became clear that very little documentation was available. Next, extensive literature search was conducted on the role of risk and reliability concepts in project management. Probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) techniques are being used with increasing regularity both in and outside of NASA. The value and the usage of PRA techniques were reviewed for large projects. It was found that both civilian and military branches of the space industry have traditionally refrained from using PRA, which was developed and expanded by nuclear industry. Although much has changed with the end of the cold war and the Challenger disaster, it was found that ingrained anti-PRA culture is hard to stop. Examples of skepticism against the use of risk management and assessment techniques were found both in the literature and in conversations with some technical staff. Program and project managers need to be convinced that the applicability and use of risk management and risk assessment techniques is much broader than just in the traditional safety-related areas of application. The time has come to begin to uniformly apply these techniques. The whole idea of risk-based system can maximize the 'return on investment' that the public demands. Also, it would be very useful if all project documents of NASA Langley Research Center, pre-phase A through final report, are carefully stored in a central repository preferably in electronic format.

Sarper, Hueseyin↗
NASA NTRS2009

Management of Service Projects in Support of Space Flight Research

Goal:To provide human health and performance countermeasures, knowledge, technologies, and tools to enable safe, reliable, and productive human space exploration . [HRP-47051] Specific Objectives: 1) Develop capabilities, necessary countermeasures, and technologies in support of human space exploration, focusing on mitigating the highest risks to human health and performance. 2) Define and improve human spaceflight medical, environmental, and human factors standards. 3) Develop technologies that serve to reduce medical and environmental risks, to reduce human systems resource requirements (mass, volume, power, data, etc.) and to ensure effective human-system integration across exploration systems. 4) Ensure maintenance of Agency core competencies necessary to enable risk reduction in the following areas: A. Space medicine B. Physiological and behavioral effects of long duration spaceflight on the human body C. Space environmental effects, including radiation, on human health and performance D. Space "human factors" [HRP-47051]. Service projects can form integral parts of research-based project-focused programs to provide specialized functions. Traditional/classic project management methodologies and agile approaches are not mutually exclusive paradigms. Agile strategies can be combined with traditional methods and applied in the management of service projects functioning in changing environments. Creative collaborations afford a mechanism for mitigation of constrained resource limitations.

Love, J.↗
NASA NTRS2009

Employing Earned Value Management in Government Research and Design - Lessons Learned from the Trenches

To effectively manage a project, the project manager must have a plan, understand the current conditions, and be able to take action to correct the course when challenges arise. Research and design projects face technical, schedule, and budget challenges that make it difficult to utilize project management tools developed for projects based on previously demonstrated technologies. Projects developing new technologies by their inherent nature are trying something new and thus have little to no data to support estimates for schedule and cost, let alone the technical outcome. Projects with a vision for the outcome but little confidence in the exact tasks to accomplish in order to achieve the vision incur cost and schedule penalties when conceptual solutions require unexpected iterations or even a reinvention of the plan. This presentation will share the project management methodology and tools developed through trial and error for a NASA research and design project combining industry, academia, and NASA inhouse work in which Earned Value Management principles were employed but adapted for the reality of the government financial system and the reality of challenging technology development. The priorities of the presented methodology are flexibility, accountability, and simplicity to give the manager tools to help deliver to the customer while not using up valuable time and resources on extensive planning and analysis. This presentation will share the methodology, tools, and work through failed and successful examples from the three years of process evolution.

Simon, Tom↗
NASA NTRS2003

ASK Magazine

The Academy of Program and Project Leadership (APPL) and ASK Magazine is presented. APPL is a research-based organization that serves NASA program and project managers, as well as project teams, at every level of development. In 1997, APPL was created from an earlier program to underscore the importance that NASA places on project management and project teams through a wide variety of products and services, including knowledge sharing, classroom and online courses, career development guidance, performance support, university partnerships, and advanced technology tools. ASK Magazine grew out of our Knowledge Sharing Initiative. The stories that appear in ASK are written by the 'best of the best' project managers, primarily from NASA, but also from other government agencies and industry. These stories contain genuine nuggets of knowledge and wisdom that are transferable across projects. Who better than a project manager to help another project manager address a critical issue on a project? Big projects, small projects-they're all here in ASK. APPL is one of our most exciting publications about project management.

Edward Hoffman↗
NASA NTRS2019

Managing Programs and Projects at NASA

The presentation provides an overview of the NASA organization and several highlights of major NASA Programs and Projects. The presentation then provides additional details regarding project management processes and requirements at NASA. The briefing concludes with insights and information regarding management, communication and collaboration between NASA and international partners on joint projects. All information contained in this briefing is from the public domain.

Smith, Jeffrey D.↗
NASA NTRS2008

NASA's Cryogenic Fluid Management Technology Project

The Cryogenic Fluid Management (CFM) Project's primary objective is to develop storage, transfer, and handling technologies for cryogens that will support the enabling of high performance cryogenic propulsion systems, lunar surface systems and economical ground operations. Such technologies can significantly reduce propellant launch mass and required on-orbit margins, reduce or even eliminate propellant tank fluid boil-off losses for long term missions, and simplify vehicle operations. This paper will present the status of the specific technologies that the CFM Project is developing. The two main areas of concentration are analysis models development and CFM hardware development. The project develops analysis tools and models based on thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and existing flight/test data. These tools assist in the development of pressure/thermal control devices (such as the Thermodynamic Vent System (TVS), and Multi-layer insulation); with the ultimate goal being to develop a mature set of tools and models that can characterize the performance of the pressure/thermal control devices incorporated in the design of an entire CFM system with minimal cryogen loss. The project does hardware development and testing to verify our understanding of the physical principles involved, and to validate the performance of CFM components, subsystems and systems. This database provides information to anchor our analytical models. This paper describes some of the current activities of the NASA's Cryogenic Fluid Management Project.

Tramel, Terri L.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Data management for community research projects: A JGOFS case study

Since the mid 1980s, much of the marine science research effort in the United Kingdom has been focused into large scale collaborative projects involving public sector laboratories and university departments, termed Community Research Projects. Two of these, the Biogeochemical Ocean Flux Study (BOFS) and the North Sea Project incorporated large scale data collection to underpin multidisciplinary modeling efforts. The challenge of providing project data sets to support the science was met by a small team within the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) operating as a topical data center. The role of the data center was to both work up the data from the ship's sensors and to combine these data with sample measurements into online databases. The working up of the data was achieved by a unique symbiosis between data center staff and project scientists. The project management, programming and data processing skills of the data center were combined with the oceanographic experience of the project communities to develop a system which has produced quality controlled, calibrated data sets from 49 research cruises in 3.5 years of operation. The data center resources required to achieve this were modest and far outweighed by the time liberated in the scientific community by the removal of the data processing burden. Two online project databases have been assembled containing a very high proportion of the data collected. As these are under the control of BODC their long term availability as part of the UK national data archive is assured. The success of the topical data center model for UK Community Research Project data management has been founded upon the strong working relationships forged between the data center and project scientists. These can only be established by frequent personal contact and hence the relatively small size of the UK has been a critical factor. However, projects covering a larger, even international scale could be successfully supported by a network of topical data centers managing online databases which are interconnected by object oriented distributed data management systems over wide area networks.

Lowry, Roy K.↗
NASA NTRS2002

A "Sweet 16" of Rules About Teamwork

The following "Sweet 16" rules included in this paper derive from a longer paper by APPL Director Dr. Edward Hoffman and myself entitled " 99 Rules for Managing Faster, Better, Cheaper Projects." Our sources consisted mainly of "war stories" told by master project managers in my book Simultaneous Management: Managing Projects in a Dynamic Environment (AMACOM, The American Management Association, 1996). The Simultaneous Management model was a result of 10 years of intensive research and testing conducted with the active participation of master project managers from leading private organizations such as AT&T, DuPont, Exxon, General Motors, IBM, Motorola and Procter & Gamble. In a more recent study, led by Dr. Hoffman, we learned that master project managers in leading public organizations employ most of these rules as well. Both studies, in private and public organizations, found that a dynamic environment calls for dynamic management, and that is especially clear in how successful project managers think about their teams.

Laufer, Alexander↗
NASA NTRS1993

Data management for support of the Oregon Transect Ecosystem Research (OTTER) project

Management of data collected during projects that involve large numbers of scientists is an often overlooked aspect of the experimental plan. Ecosystem science projects like the Oregon Transect Ecosystem Research (OTTER) Project that involve many investigators from many institutions and that run for multiple years, collect and archive large amounts of data. These data range in size from a few kilobytes of information for such measurements as canopy chemistry and meteorological variables, to hundreds of megabytes of information for such items as views from multi-band spectrometers flown on aircraft and scenes from imaging radiometers aboard satellites. Organizing and storing data from the OTTER Project, certifying those data, correcting errors in data sets, validating the data, and distributing those data to other OTTER investigators is a major undertaking. Using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Pilot Land Data System (PLDS), a Support mechanism was established for the OTTER Project which accomplished all of the above. At the onset of the interaction between PLDS and OTTER, it was not certain that PLDS could accomplish these tasks in a manner that would aid researchers in the OTTER Project. This paper documents the data types that were collected under the auspices of the OTTER Project and the procedures implemented to store, catalog, validate, and certify those data. The issues of the compliance of investigators with data-management requirements, data use and certification, and the ease of retrieving data are discussed. We advance the hypothesis that formal data management is necessary in ecological investigations involving multiple investigators using many data gathering instruments and experimental procedures. The issues and experience gained in this exercise give an indication of the needs for data management systems that must be addressed in the coming decades when other large data-gathering endeavors are undertaken by the ecological science community.

Skiles, J. W.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Cryogenic Fluid Management Technology for Moon and Mars Missions

In support of the U.S. Space Exploration Policy, focused cryogenic fluid management technology efforts are underway within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Under the auspices of the Exploration Technology Development Program, cryogenic fluid management technology efforts are being conducted by the Cryogenic Fluid Management Project. Cryogenic Fluid Management Project objectives are to develop storage, transfer, and handling technologies for cryogens to support high performance demands of lunar, and ultimately, Mars missions in the application areas of propulsion, surface systems, and Earth-based ground operations. The targeted use of cryogens and cryogenic technologies for these application areas is anticipated to significantly reduce propellant launch mass and required on-orbit margins, to reduce and even eliminate storage tank boil-off losses for long term missions, to economize ground pad storage and transfer operations, and to expand operational and architectural operations at destination. This paper organizes Cryogenic Fluid Management Project technology efforts according to Exploration Architecture target areas, and discusses the scope of trade studies, analytical modeling, and test efforts presently underway, as well as future plans, to address those target areas. The target areas are: liquid methane/liquid oxygen for propelling the Altair Lander Ascent Stage, liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen for propelling the Altair Lander Descent Stage and Ares V Earth Departure Stage, liquefaction, zero boil-off, and propellant scavenging for Lunar Surface Systems, cold helium and zero boil-off technologies for Earth-Based Ground Operations, and architecture definition studies for long term storage and on-orbit transfer and pressurization of LH2, cryogenic Mars landing and ascent vehicles, and cryogenic production via in situ resource utilization on Mars.

Doherty, Michael P.↗
NASA NTRS2018

An “EPIIC” Vision to Evolve Project Integration, Innovation, and Collaboration with Broad Impact for How NASA Executes Complex Projects

Evolving Project Integration, Innovation, and Collaboration (EPIIC) is a vision defined to transform the way projects manage information to support real-time decisions, capture best practices and lessons learned, perform assessments, and manage risk across a portfolio of projects. The foundational project management needs for data and information will be revolutionized through innovations on how we manage and access that data, implement configuration control, and certify compliance. The embedded intelligence of new interactive data interfaces integrate technical and programmatic data such that near real time analytics can be accomplished to more efficiently and accurately complete systems engineering and project management tasks. The system-wide data analytics that are integrated into customized data interfaces allows the growing team of engineers and managers required to develop and implement major NASA missions the ability to access authoritative source(s) of system information while greatly reducing the labor required to complete system assessments. This would allow, for example, much of what is accomplished in a scheduled design review to take place as needed, between any team members, at any time. An intelligent data interface that rigorously integrates systems engineering and project management information in near real time can provide substantially greater insight for systems engineers, project managers, and the large diverse teams required to complete a complex project. System engineers, programmatic personnel (those who focus on cost, schedule, and risk), the technical engineering disciplines, and project management can realize immediate benefit from the shared vision described herein. Implementation of the vision also enables significant improvements in the performance of the engineered system being developed.

Moreland, Robert J.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Managing MDO Software Development Projects

Over the past decade, the NASA Langley Research Center developed a series of 'grand challenge' applications demonstrating the use of parallel and distributed computation and multidisciplinary design optimization. All but the last of these applications were focused on the high-speed civil transport vehicle; the final application focused on reusable launch vehicles. Teams of discipline experts developed these multidisciplinary applications by integrating legacy engineering analysis codes. As teams became larger and the application development became more complex with increasing levels of fidelity and numbers of disciplines, the need for applying software engineering practices became evident. This paper briefly introduces the application projects and then describes the approaches taken in project management and software engineering for each project; lessons learned are highlighted.

Townsend, J. C.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Shared Voyage: Learning and Unlearning from Remarkable Projects

Shared Voyage is about four remarkable projects: the Advanced Composition Explorer (NASA), the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (U.S. Air Force), the Pathfinder Solar-Powered Airplane (NASA), and the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (U.S.Air Force). Each project is presented as a case study comprised of stories collected from key members of the project teams. The stories found in the book are included with the purpose of providing an effective learning source for project management, encouraging the unlearning of outdated project management concepts, and enhancing awareness of the contexts surrounding different projects. Significantly different from project concepts found in most project management literature, Shared Voyage highlights concepts like a will to win, a results-oriented focus, and collaboration through trust. All four project teams researched in this study applied similar concepts; however, they applied them differently, tailoring them to fit the context of their own particular projects. It is clear that the one best way approach which is still the prevailing paradigm in project management literature should be replaced by a new paradigm: Even though general project management principles exist, their successful application depends on the specifics of the situation.

Laufer, Alexander↗
NASA NTRS2009

How Configuration Management Helps Projects Innovate and Communicate

This slide presentation reviews the concept of Configuration Management (CM) and compares it to the standard view of Project management (PM). It presents two PM models: (1) Kepner-Tregoe,, and the Deming models, describes why projects fail, and presents methods of how CM helps projects innovate and communicate.

Cioletti, Louis A.↗
NASA NTRS1965

Managing the mariner mars project.

Mariner Mars project management noting role in system design, launch period establishment, parts procurement, etc

MARINER IV SPACE PROBE↗
NASA NTRS2001

ASK Magazine

Not everyone looks forward to reviews. Dog and pony shows I've heard them called. Exercises in putting together Power Point charts. Other less tasteful descriptions abound, but I won't bother to summarize these. This is a tasteful magazine after all. In this issue, we've assembled a number of articles on the subject of reviews, particularly as they occur in the NASA project world (although we cover the subject from other perspectives too). Veteran NASA Project Manager Marty Davis, in his article Tangled Up in Reviews, writes, "Many people regard reviews as something onerous, but if we can tailor them so that they're not as bad as they have to be, it can be a great benefit to a project manager." Great benefits to the project manager is what you'll find in Marty's story as he describes not only tailoring a single review but the entire lifecycle of reviews in his project. In Jo Gunderson's story, Calling Down the Fire on Yourself, she describes a young NASA Project Manager who does just that because, as he tells her, I needed to know if there was anything that I had overlooked." How he brings fire down on himself at his project review will inspire other young Project Managers, seasoned managers, and anyone else who reads this powerful story. Leave Your Ego at the Door, by Jenny Baer-Reidhart and Ray Morgan, uses reviews to highlight the creative collaboration that existed between NASA and one of its industry partners. The protagonist of this story is a company who took advantage of NASAs expert advice during reviews and accomplished amazing feats as a result. The story also examines how disasters might well have been avoided by two other NASA partners had they been as open-minded as the first company during their reviews. In Roy Malone's story, Standing Offer, a NASA Project Manager describes how he used a crack review team to help him pass a critical certification inspection while he was a Combat Systems Officer in the Navy. Malone invited the reviewers to come back several times so that they would be able to focus in detail on the many areas of the program that would be scrutinized during the certification inspection. These are just a sampling of some of the articles you'll find in this issue of ASK. We believe this issue offers ample evidence that talented Project Managers know how to use reviews to the great benefit of their projects. A talented Project Manager will typically figure out a way to turn any onerous task into a useful learning exercise. These Project Managers demonstrate that the real value of reviews is that they provide a chance to learn something. No dog and pony shows here.

Laufer, Alexander↗
NASA NTRS2002

Engineering Management Capstone Project EM 697: Compare and Contrast Risk Management Implementation at NASA and the US Army

NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) and the U.S. Army at Redstone Arsenal were analyzed to determine whether they were successful in implementing their risk management program. Risk management implementation surveys were distributed to aid in this analysis. The scope is limited to NASA S&MA (Safety and Mission Assurance) at MSFC, including applicable support contractors, and the US Army Engineering Directorate, including applicable contractors, located at Redstone Arsenal. NASA has moderately higher risk management implementation survey scores than the Army. Accordingly, the implementation of the risk management program at NASA is considered good while only two of five of the survey categories indicated that the risk management implementation is good at the Army.

Brothers, Mary Ann↗