Challenge
- Integrate commercial project management standards into the NASA acquisition process.
- Increase visibility into NASA acquisition timeline.
Solution
- Evaluate project and acquisition management standards, methodologies and processes.
- Applying project management best practices: use a cloud-based scheduling application to identify a critical path, reduce risk, and increase reliability of acquisitions baseline schedules.
- Develop project management templates and processes to identify, track and measure acquisition tasks, timelines and progress.
- Develop communication plans establishing to whom, what type, when, priority and how information will be distributed.
- Develop detailed acquisition schedules identifying leads for each task with responsibility for ensuring timely delivery of the required deliverable.
- Identify barriers to timeliness, efficiency, and quality and prepare recommendations to implement a best practices approach applying industry standards in project management and scheduling.
- Develop standardized templates for acquisition project team charter, mission, objectives, roles, responsibilities, and team operations.
Results
- Developed and implemented 11 new project management schedule templates with plans, processes, and charters for NASA acquisitions. Per new NASA policy, the templates are used for all new procurements above the Simplified Acquisition Threshold.
- Developed a schedule template with built-in flexibility for milestone tracking: Binary, phases, and tasks. The schedule template identifies each key step in the acquisition process and the responsible person(s).
- Created a project schedule analysis toolkit that examines average variations in task duration to provide NASA with data driven management that examines baseline to current project performance, enables risk management and delivers improved acquisition outcomes for the agency.