JPL's Approach for Helping Flight Project Managers Meet Today's Management Challenges

All across NASA project managers are facing tough new challenges. NASA has imposed increased oversight and the number of projects at Centers such as JPL has exploded from a handful of large projects to a much greater number of smaller ones. Experienced personnel are retiring at increasing rates and younger, less experienced managers are being rapidly promoted up the ladder. Budgets are capped, competition among NASA Centers and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) has increased significantly and there is no longer any tolerance to cost overruns. On top of all this, implementation schedules have been reduced by 25 to 50% to reduce run-out costs, making it even more difficult to define requirements, validate heritage assumptions and make accurate cost estimates during the early phases of the life-cycle.JPL's executive management, under the leadership of the Associate Director for Flight Projects and Mission Success, have attempted to meet these challenges by improving operations in five areas: (1) increased standardization, where it is judged to have significant benefit; (2) better balance and more effective partnering between projects and the line management; (3) increased infrastructure support; (4) improved management training; and (5) more effective review and oversight.