2012 Program Excellence Award

2012 Program Excellence Award

The Aviation Week Program Excellence Award initiative was developed in 2004 in recognition of the need to develop future program leaders who in addition to facing challenges similar to those of the past, will also have to deal with increasing technical, organizational and business complexities. Program leaders must balance their program opportunities, together with better supply chain integration, and higher efficiencies. They will have the ability to apply Lessons Learned and Best Practices, as well as create transformation and Next Practices. The goal of this initiative is to recognize and promote program excellence in terms of performance, leadership capability, and outstanding lessons that can and will be shared broadly within the aerospace and defense community. By taking part in the submission process, nominees agree to be part of this program to share information.

Framework

The criteria for this award are based on the best elements of program/project leadership excellence programs developed by the Strategic Project Leadership Program of the Technological Leadership Institute, the NSIT Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards, and the NASA/USRA Center for Program/Project Management Research.

The award will examine four critical areas according to the following framework:

The evaluation team will determine finalists and winners on the basis of scores in these four categories. The winner(s) will be featured in Aviation Week & Space Technology and at www.AviationWeek.com, as well as honored at the annual Aviation Week Aerospace & Defense Programs Conference to be held November 5-7, 2012 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Entries will be divided into categories that include: 1) Sub-system R&D/SDD; 2) Sub-system

Production/Sustainment; 3) System R&D/SDD; and 4) System Production/Sustainment. Categories may be added by judges if warranted (for instance, separation of production and sustainment) and based on current aerospace and defense environment. Finalists will be chosen in each category, based on meeting

a threshold score that will be determined by the evaluation team; the winner(s) will be chosen on the basis of both Phase I and Phase II elements.

The Evaluation Team reserves the right to choose no winners and to name an Overall Winner, if the nominations so warrant, based on the combination of scoring against the criteria, best practices, and game-changing leadership.

2012 Evaluation Team

The evaluation team for the 2012 AVIATION WEEK Program Excellence Awards includes: Jack Gleason, VP Business Systems, Honeywell Aerospace

Michael Bruno, Deputy Managing Editor-Military, Aviation Week

Nanette Bouchard, VP Program Management, Boeing Defense, Space & Security

Jake Gatch, VP Business Management Systems, BAE Systems

Ed Hoffman, Director of the Academy for Program/Project Engineering Leadership,

Jane Krueger, Director Navigation Programs, Rockwell Collins

Charles “Chuck” Mills, VP Program Management, Lockheed Martin Corp.

Lewis Peach, NASA

Aaron Shenhar, Professor of Supply Chain and Project Management Rutgers Business School

Jesse Stewart, Professor of Program Management, Defense Acquisition University

Nick Yorio, Corporate Director Program Management, Northrop Grumman Corp.

Intellectual Property

Note: Individuals outside your company review award submissions. All information submitted will deal with the program’s management, leadership, and processes, and not any business-related or otherwise classified topic. Do not include any materials marked Proprietary. All documents will be copied and distributed via the Internet to the aforementioned Evaluation Team and will be considered as public knowledge.

By submitting an entry to the Aviation Week Program Excellence Awards program, you are indicating agreement to participate in outreach efforts to share Lessons Learned/Best Practices in an effort to lift the bar on program leadership across the industry. Entries may be also used for comparative research among programs to draw conclusions and lessons learned across the industry.

Format of Submission

The Program Excellence Awards process involves two phases of evaluation.

Phase 1 – Nominees submit, in narrative format, their perspective on why the program excels and identifies the teachable lessons in program execution within the past 36 months (beginning January 2009). The focus in this narrative should be how the program has successfully addressed challenging issues or met seemingly difficult requirements. Limit this narrative to four pages, 12 point Times Roman typeface with 1” margins. The current areas of focus for performance improvement include value chain optimization, transition of programs from one phase to another, achieving affordability goals, and system integration.

 Include with the narrative a one-page biography of the program leader, including what sets this individual apart as a leader.

Name of Program: Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL)

Name of GRAIL Program Leader: Maria T. Zuber, GRAIL Principal Investigator Phone Number: 617-253-6397

Email: zuber@mit.edu

Postage Address: Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, 54-518,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 Name of GRAIL Spacecraft Program Manager: John Henk

Phone Number: 423-231-3051 Email: henk013@msn.com

Postage Address: Lockheed Martin Space Systems (retired), 211 Lake Lane, New Tazewell, TN 37825

Name of GRAIL Project Manager: David H. Lehman Phone Number: 818-354-2023

Email: david.h.lehman@jpl.nasa.gov

Postage Address: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109 Name of Customer Representative: William Knopf

Phone Number: 202-358-0742 Email: william.knopf-1@nasa.gov

Bio for program leaders:

Maria T. Zuber is the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently serves as Principal Investigator of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Mission. Professor Zuber has been involved in more than half a dozen NASA planetary missions aimed at mapping the Moon, Mars, Mercury and several asteroids. She holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an Sc.M. and Ph.D. from Brown University. Professor Zuber is the first woman to lead a science department at MIT and the first to lead a NASA planetary mission. She has won numerous awards including NASA’s

Outstanding Scientific Achievement Medal and Distinguished Public Service Medal, as well as the Geological Society of America G.K. Gilbert Award and the American Astronautical

Society/Planetary Society Carl Sagan Memorial Award. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Philosophical Society, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society of America, and the American Geophysical Union, where she served as president of the Planetary Sciences Section. In 2004 Professor Zuber served on the Presidential Commission on the

Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy. In 2002 Discover magazine named her one of the 50 most important women in science, and in 2008 she was named to the

USNews/Harvard Kennedy School List of America’s Best Leaders.

John W. Henk, a US Air Force Academy graduate, has 30 years experience with Lockheed Martin, principally in its Space Exploration Systems. He has actively participated in over a dozen NASA planetary and deep space missions from Magellan through GRAIL. His assembly, test & launch operations (ATLO) hands-on work have produced spacecraft that ventured to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, a comet, and the Moon for science investigations.

David H. Lehman received his B.S from the New Mexico State University and M.S from Colorado State University; he has 31 years of planetary exploration experience with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is the Project Manager for GRAIL and also served as Project Manager of the Deep Space 1 Project. Mr. Lehman is a retired Captain from the Navy Reserve.

Managing GRAIL: Getting to the Moon on Cost, on Schedule and on Spec INTRODUCTION

The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission launched September 2011 and placed twin spacecraft in a low-altitude, near-circular polar orbit around the Moon in February 2012. GRAIL is a NASA Discovery Program mission with a project cost cap. Led by Principal Investigator (PI) Professor Maria T. Zuber of MIT and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, GRAIL will precisely map the gravitational field of the Moon to reveal its internal structure “from crust to core,” determine its thermal evolution, and extend this knowledge to other terrestrial planets. The mission is the first robotic demonstration of precision formation flying around another planetary body. GRAIL is performing high-resolution range-rate measurements between the orbiters using a Ka-band payload. The spacecraft range-rate data (changes in separation distance between the orbiters), time-correlated by NASA’s Deep Space Network, provides a direct measure of lunar gravity. GRAIL is currently conducting science operations and will complete its prime mission in June 2012. As stated by Professor Zuber in Congressional testimony in September 2011 “…the mission …launched on spec, on time and under budget…”

PROJECT CONCEPT

GRAIL benefitted significantly from technological, operational and scientific advances

demonstrated by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), launched in 2002 and now in an extended mission. GRACE is measuring Earth’s gravity field, calculating the

separation distance between two spacecraft using GPS to correlate spacecraft timing and a microwave ranging system to measure spacecraft distance changes indicative of the distribution of mass in the Earth’s interior.

For the Discovery announcement of opportunity competition, Prof. Zuber and JPL conceived a “GRACE at the Moon” mission. On the basis of a competitive process of evaluation, the team selected Lockheed Martin (LM) to build the spacecraft, a Delta-II launch vehicle (LV) and a modified version of the JPL science instrument. Driving criteria for project conception and proposal “win” strategy were as follows: (1) propose a mission within the Discovery Program cost cap, with comfortable financial headroom; (2) judiciously utilize heritage designs and mature spacecraft development processes from JPL and LM; (3) architect the mission with limited and clean interfaces and robust technical resource margins; (4) reduce risk by early payload prototyping; (5) enlist a strong team of experienced key personnel, including persons who worked on GRACE and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO); and (6) define

measurement requirements on the basis of instrument and spacecraft capability.

As proposed and selected by NASA, GRAIL has six science investigations. These investigations formed the basis for the level-1 requirements that constitute the contractual agreement with NASA. A key success factor for the project is that the level-1 requirements remained unchanged throughout the entire project development cycle.

The GRAIL flight system is made up of the spacecraft and the payload. The two spacecraft, provided by LM, are derivatives of the Experimental Small Spacecraft-11 (XSS-11) and MRO designs. (GRAIL implemented a simplification of the MRO flight avionics) The GRAIL

spacecraft are twins, but not identical twins; a small number of hardware components are mirror images because they need to point at each other across space. The twin spacecraft are

approximately the size of an apartment-sized washer-dryer set. The science instrument for GRAIL, called the Lunar Gravity Ranging System (LGRS), is derived from the GRACE mission. LGRS was built by JPL, which procured some sub-assemblies from suppliers.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Per the NASA Discovery Program paradigm, GRAIL is a PI-led mission. Prof. Zuber is responsible for all aspects of mission success, and she leads the GRAIL science team. As a “hands-on” PI, she participated prominently in all aspects of project development, including risk management, reviews and financial decision making. She selected JPL to perform project management, deliver the payload, lead mission operations and perform systems engineering, safety and mission assurance and business functions, and perform gravity modeling activities. JPL in consultation with Prof. Zuber selected LM to deliver the flight systems, including spacecraft fabrication, system integration, test, launch site support and spacecraft operations. GRAIL’s staffing was consciously designed with the following outcomes in mind: a) designate a larger-than-the-norm number of staff as proposed key personnel, all of whom brought substantial flight project experience to the team; b) include several veterans of the heritage projects,

GRACE and MRO; and c) retain all key personnel until their areas of responsibility were

completed. Under the heading of “Team Competency” one participant noted: “Have never seen a program with as high a percentage of talent-level at all levels of the organization - huge effect on small team efficiency.” Contributions of all team members were openly valued. More than a few support personnel were recipients of the coveted “Holy GRAIL Award”, a personalized mug presented by the PI in a public forum to celebrate a special contribution to mission success. As a single-string, dual spacecraft mission, GRAIL’s guiding philosophy was low-risk

implementation; proactive risk management was integral to project success. Monthly Risk Board meetings included the PI, Project Manager (PM), most key personnel and relevant support staff. Before life-cycle reviews, meetings were extended to walk through every risk. Culturally,

changes, and reviewed and approved all requests for use of project cost reserves. Only the PI could approve release of cost reserves, a practice that had a powerful effect on encouraging team leads to solve their own problems and bring forward only requests that were truly needed, well justified, and reasonable in amount relative to the scope of the problem. Not all requests were approved. On the other hand, the PI would make periodic calls for staff to propose ideas for risk-reduction activities, and value-added investments were usually supported. All liens were

conservatively tracked at 100% likelihood of occurrence, and earned value management (EVM) was implemented.

SYSTEM INTEGRATION

GRAIL entered Assembly, Test and Launch Operations (ATLO) with 40 days’ schedule margin for LM Colorado activities (flight system assembly, integration, functional test, environmental test, and transportation to the launch processing facility) and 25 days’ margin for Florida activities (Launch System assembly and integration, launch-vehicle-to-spacecraft integration, fueling, and launch). These planned margin days excluded second-shifts, weekends, and

holidays. In practice, work-to-ship and work-to-launch were tight, with judicious application of cost reserves to support second-shift and overtime augmentations. But when KSC requested extra processing time because GRAIL was the last east-coast Delta launch, the spacecraft team reworked the development schedule to deliver both spacecraft to the launch site a week early. A critical success factor was LM and JPL’s extensive experience in ATLO, especially the fact that John Henk, the LM Program Manager, had an ATLO background. The JPL/LM team knew from the school of hard knocks what items required special attention, how long tests and other actions actually took to perform, where margin would be best placed, and what flexibilities existed in the ATLO flow. Per plan, there were sufficient spares to keep making forward progress, and hardware could be swapped from GRAIL-A to GRAIL-B or from flight spare or testbed status to test out the flight and ground software. Full-functionality ATLO test units (ATUs) were used temporarily while flight units were completing unit test; then penalty

(regression) testing was performed at the spacecraft level. Workmanship tests were performed on both spacecraft, whereas performance and stress tests were, in some cases, divided between the two. The project fully completed its proposed no-excuses Incompressible Test List tests, as well as the highest-priority Risk-Reduction Tests (RRTs).

Challenges during ATLO included late delivery of avionics (due to a myriad of small and irritating causes), hence the ATUs approach; late completion of flight software acceptance testing (largely due to competition for resources with the Juno project); and behind-schedule closeout of verification and validation (V&V) paperwork (test reports, analyses, second-set-of-eyes review, and final recording in the archiving tool). In the case of avionics, until the final flight units arrived, requirements could be tested but the official run for record could not be performed. Using the GRAIL “teaming for success” approach, JPL and LM brought on

additional staff, redeployed existing staff, and had one organization’s persons perform activities on behalf of the other - what was important was getting the job done, not rigid lines of

organizational authority. The nonhierarchical and collaborative nature of the GRAIL team was a key factor in solving the project’s technical and schedule problems.

RECOMMENDATIONS AND FUTURE APPLICATIONS

Every project is unique, so what worked for GRAIL is not a precise recipe for other space flight projects, whether sponsored by NASA or by another agency. However, it is recommended that other projects being conceived consider the GRAIL experience and select and tailor those items most applicable to a new mission concept. Lessons to consider include:

(1) Architect a sound concept from conception. Propose what you are going to launch, and launch what you proposed. Limit technology development; have limited and clean interfaces; and use capabilities-based requirements to gain large technical resources margins. Support the development activity with healthy cost and schedule reserves.

(2) Do not change the original level-1 science requirements. Any change has a flow-down effect, which gets only greater the further down in the project architecture it needs to be accommodated. (3) Conduct a comprehensive formulation (pre-commitment) effort. Perform early prototyping of any open technology developments (or significant adaptations). Conduct penetrating inheritance reviews. Make it your goal to have no liens going into implementation.

(4) Be agile in implementation (final design and development). Aggressively identify technical problems, and respond to them quickly. Practice proactive risk management; empower all members of the team to identify risks.

(5) Recruit an excellent team, both key personnel and support personnel. Entice them to remain on the project until their work is done. Consciously incorporate teambuilding events; a

“badgeless” team will join together to overcome the tough times that are inherent in any project. (6) Practice focused project management - not hands-off, but not micromanaging. Begin with a realistic schedule. Use life cycle reviews as control milestones for the entire team; everyone has to deliver products compatible with their colleagues’, and at the same time. Focus on “closure,” (e.g., complete trade studies in Phase A, complete open paper in Phase D).