"The FAS team brought NASA Goddard's Procurement Office into the 21'st century"
Mary Stevens
Former Deputy Procurement Officer
Challenge
- Integrate project management principles into acquisition processes, including effective metrics, schedule, and milestones to enhance practices.
- Inconsistent systems and metrics for tracking procurement lead-times; Centers are capturing lead-time data, but the information is difficult to extract and report from the current electronic systems and not readily available.
- Lack of consistent milestones and reporting.
Solution
- Evaluate Goddard Space Flight Center’s project and acquisition methodologies, and processes to fully integrate project management standards and industry best practices.
- Customize configuration of a cloud-based project management software.
- Establish clear, resource-loaded schedules showing all the key steps and milestones in the path to selection as well as commitments from key players.
- Provide ongoing support for virtual and in-person meetings through weekly schedule reviews, status updates, meeting minutes, and action items.
- Create customizable reporting tools to provide critical information to leadership to make data driven decisions.
- Identify barriers to timeliness, efficiency, and quality and prepare recommendations to implement a best practices approach applying industry standards in project management and scheduling.
- Continual process improvement through data analysis and customer input to enhance acquisition schedules and related actions.
Results
- Continuous monitoring of more than 600 contracts over a seven-year period with a monetary value inclusive of options over $140 Billion.
- Developed through our cloud-based project software over 250 business rules, 250 custom actions and over 500 custom fields.
- Engage with and support over 150 active users.
- Created an interactive user interface, allowing users to request the creation of new schedules, to track actions, provide updates, and generate customizable user reports.
- Providing customizable solutions through automated workflows to deliver standardized acquisition schedules.
- Created Data Analysis Report using statistical methodologies to provide leadership the information to identify key risk areas and drive continuous process improvement.
- Facilitated information flow between Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA Headquarters to provide critical procurement data in support of Section 878 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2019.