Suggestions for Improvement of Programmatic Risks in University Risk

Management

Throughout this paper, risk management at universities has been shown to be inconsistent. If a university would like to reduce risk and hopefully increase their success rate, the program should improve their risk management methods, borrowing from current university, government, and industry practices. Some very basic strategies can be used to reduce overall risk of mission failure. The following practices should be emphasized in a program from the beginning.

3.3.1 Funding and Competition

Demonstrating a good grasp on risk management is necessary to get funding and win competitions. Reducing the risk of an overall mission can be accomplished by allowing significant risk only in new research areas. Risk can be minimized elsewhere by using hardware with flight-heritage as well as standard algorithms and processes. Design re-use must be done carefully, but it can be valuable for high-level systems as well as at the electronic component level. In cases where the risks are inherent to the mission, the program should maximize the satellite’s value for the sponsor by focusing on the needs of the sponsor and designing to meet those requirements.

3.3.2 Experience

Continuity in student leadership is important in order to keep corporate memory as well as push the project forward. It is necessary to prepare students for these positions. One way to do this would be to have a training/mentoring program. Other options include having students take technical classes, participate in leadership seminars, or attend conferences.

To reduce the risk associated with a student’s lack of experience, it is necessary to train people working directly with the subsystems to identify risk. Application-based training or academic classes are one option, but this might be too difficult to implement in a small program.

must identify risk. By building a template of risk failures, students have a list from which to work. This idea will be discussed further in Section 4.2.

3.3.3 Staff

Personnel management is an area in which consistency will lower risk. One option is to hire a core group of people to ensure the most important work is being completed. By tying the staff’s work to a salary, they are obliged to work a set number of hours per week, and there will be more consistency in the program.

Even though staffing can be difficult, student groups should try to not have only one person working on each subsystem. By having every member of the team working on two tasks, there will be no single-string workers, and the members of the team have someone to help and motivate them. This may not be feasible if there are too many jobs and not enough students, but that might also point to the idea that the task is too complex or the team size needs to be bigger. Sharing assignments also helps communication among groups since people are working on more than one task. This distribution of jobs might be difficult to maintain, but it would be beneficial for the students and for the team’s communication.

When working with students, there are times in the semester when workload is lower, and more time and energy can be devoted to extra-curricular activities such as satellite programs. During these times, the projects should focus on critical items such as risk mitigation. After student breaks and at the start of a semester are ideal times to review risk and ensure that students are staying focused on risk management.

3.3.4 Direction

The professors and students must work with all of the groups that oversee the project to define the mission and its requirements from the start of the program. It is then necessary to keep track of requirements, their sources, and the rationale behind them as well as flow them down to the rest of the system.

To maintain the proper focus, the mission and its requirements must be clearly defined, and the students must have oversight of their work. Setting mission goals and strict requirements

3.3.5 Schedule

Falling behind schedule at any point in the design life can be a huge barrier to meeting a launch date. This is because not being on schedule will drive up costs and encourage risk taking in order to meet a (most likely inflexible) launch date. From the start, everyone must take the mentality that they are on a flight program, and deadlines must be met, but not by dropping risk management. The team should build a reasonable schedule, with margin, and one way is to step backwards from the launch date using key milestones (driven by integration), and stick to the review schedule that is set by the launch date. This extremely important job should be the job of someone with experience and that can enforce the limits on the team.

The strict deadlines imposed by an immovable launch date can lead to poor and hasty fixes of a student-satellite design. One solution to this problem is to implement a tiered design. By using spiral requirements, the team can do multiple releases of the satellite based on the tiered requirements, but every release can fly. This approach can be done for each subsystem or for the system as a whole. However, this staged release approach can be a hard method to implement for teams with little experience and low funding.

NASA Langley Research Center suggests that small satellite programs should focus on risks preventing the completion of a milestone. Instead of focusing on the risks that threaten individual technological advancements, the team should examine what the risks are that must be overcome to reach program milestone completions. The resources can be reallocated to better ensure that the next objective is reached.46

Oftentimes, the staff of a project can get discouraged or pessimistic about a project, leading to its delay and eventual cancellation. The Quakefinder41 group tried not to let that happen to them, and they have the following suggestions. A project must be approached with the mindset that the team will succeed, and even if there isn’t enough time, the team must be creative in its solutions. A solution that is “good enough” is often the way to proceed, as Quakefinder demonstrated. In addition, creating infrastructure in a class or program for multi-year programs would be beneficial to avoid “reinventing the wheel” and slowing progress.

3.3.6 Documentation

workforce nears retirement, and the same issue plagues student satellite projects because of their high turnover rates. Retaining students as they transition from undergraduate to graduate school is a great advantage for a satellite program. Many schools encourage students to stay for their graduate work, but this cannot be guaranteed.

Therefore, it is imperative that the universities have a good method for transferring information from one year to the next as students graduate or otherwise leave the program. A consistent and enforced policy should be created in order to pass along the important issues in designing, integrating, testing, risk management, and operating space missions. This knowledge transfer can be better controlled using consistent documentation and knowledge-management tools throughout the program.

Consistent application of well-defined procedures, guidelines, and documentation can help to minimize careless errors while maintaining knowledge transfer. The management of the program should also stress that documentation is a necessary aspect of the engineering design process. An online documentation system can be used to keep documents in a central location with version and access control.

Concept tracking and keeping up-to-date information is aided by a configuration management process. Configuration management, in which revision control, change control, and release control are regulated, can address many common problems before they escalate. Many schools do not use a system to control their documents, but without this method, students will not know what information is current, how and when decisions were made, or what aspects of the design have been set. It would be best to have the system run by students but be based on a proven system, using guidelines from industry. This is one example of taking standard practices and adapting them to student situations. These processes reduce risk by helping to document work, communicate changes, and maintain consistency as the staff varies.

Another way to minimize the effects of turnover is to break work into smaller tasks that can be completed in a semester or two. Then, the student can write a final report on that specific section of the work before he or she leaves the program.

they have, they have not publicly shared them. By distributing this information, schools are less likely to make the same mistake, saving time, money, and frustration and reducing risk. An infrastructure, which could be hosted on a common website, is needed for universities to actively carry out this plan.

3.3.7 Recruitment

Student-led programs should continually train and recruit new members, especially younger undergraduates that have the potential to be involved for many years. It is possible to recruit older students by offering credit or research for their senior theses or independent studies, but only some schools have those options.

Since university teams have difficulty getting a full team of experienced students, these teams should aim to have a three-tiered student structure.6 First, it is necessary to have student experts with knowledge of all aspects of the design. Second, people with corporate memory are valuable to a program to help discuss design decisions and rationale. Third, a large group of semi-knowledgeable students can help with design tasks and when a large staff is needed. Recruiting and maintaining this type of team will help keep the project balanced and headed in the right path.