Implementing quantitative schedule performance metrics at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

For the past several years, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Flight Projects Directorate (FPD) spearheaded the Business Change Initiative (BCI) to improve program planning and control practices to enhance cost and schedule performance. One outcome of the BCI is a renewed emphasis on schedule in the form of a directive to plan, assess, and measure schedule performance. A guideline with accompanying procedures was developed and released to institute the implementation and adoption of three essential schedule performance metrics: baseline execution index (BEI), hit-miss index (HMI), and current execution index (CEI). These metrics aid project management by quantifying schedule performance against both the schedule baseline as well as the current operating schedule. To enable Goddard's projects to generate and report the new performance metrics on a monthly basis, FPD designed and developed the Goddard Schedule Analysis Tool (GSAT), which when added to MS Project, can calculate BEI, HMI, and CEI, as well as produce associated trend reports. GSAT also provides a drill-down capability to better understand variances at lower levels of the work breakdown structure. This tool dramatically decreases the time programs and projects would normally devote to generating BEI, HMI, and CEI performance metrics, and improves the consistency in reporting for internal reviews. Prior to formal deployment, FPD surveyed its project portfolio to assess the current status of all projects and determine the appropriate scope for applicability and required adoption. To date, the requirements have been published, the tool has been deployed to all identified projects, and all projects report on the performance metrics monthly at directorate-level tag-ups. These metrics have been beneficial to the discussion and review of mission success. This paper summarizes Goddard's BCI progress to date and introduces the BE!, HMI, and CEI metrics and how these metrics can be used to monitor project schedule performance and trends. It also highlights programmatic and technical challenges associated with measuring schedule performance with these indices. An examination of the cultural resistance to the metrics and how we worked with stakeholders to understand and address their concerns are also described. Results of some initial "back-testing" of the metrics on completed projects are highlighted and actual GSAT report examples are included.