Managing Cost, schedule, and technical performance through a sustained change framework

Operating a world-renowned space flight mission portfolio under tight policy, fiscal scrutiny, and increased competition makes open communication, visible performance data, and streamlined processes challenging. To respond to these challenges and meet cost and schedule commitments, Goddard Space Flight Center's Flight Projects Directorate employed a Business Change Initiative (BCI) to infuse a series of activities coordinated to drive process improvement across Goddard's missions. The result is a framework that sustains continuous, lasting change, which actively educates and consistently applies program planning and control (PP&C) techniques to launch on time and on budget, and achieve mission success. The BCI formed an integrated community of flight projects that openly shares and applies best practices to ensure cost effective, on-time delivery for all missions. The BCI team employed a five-phase change framework to structure, guide, and respond to needed improvements and policy changes. To date, the team utilizes cross-cutting assessments of the space flight mission portfolio to envision opportunities that reinforce strengths and improve weaknesses and threats. Once these opportunities are defined, subject matter experts design, develop, and deploy changes that are scaled up or down for adoption, depending on mission requirements, and drive compliance and improve performance. Over 100 major changes were deployed from 2012-2014 spanning various PP&C disciplines to include: schedule, cost, earned value, risk, and configuration management, as well as project coordination, reporting, performance analysis, and employee education. These changes were the basis to improve cost and schedule management as well as to ensure compliance to federal and commercial policies and regulations. This paper will assess how a sustaining change framework provides a long-term strategy to maintain organization responsiveness and to continuously seek refinements and updates to tools and resources to meet cost and schedule commitments while maintaining technical excellence. This paper will also recommend how similar adoption in government and industry space agencies and companies will assist to collaborate across boundaries and build strategic relationships to achieve common goals in aerospace.