Project Planning & Control
Consistency in the Project Planning & Control (PP&C) functions and best practices for providing the most valuable inputs to management will elevate the level of professionalism to the Agency’s best practices, raise visibility for the PP&C discipline for aiding decision making, and strengthen the legitimacy of the PP&C community at NASA. Having a structured PP&C approach will also facilitate the emergence of standards across the Agency, making portfolio management and independent assessments easier to perform, characterizing “good PP&C,” and enabling evaluation of the quality of implementation of PP&C on projects and areas that could be brought to a higher standard.
The NASA PP&C function strives to:
PP&C Stewardship is the responsibility of the NASA HQ OCFO SIB Programmatic and Policy Branch (PPS). The purpose of PP&C Stewardship is to build the Agency Programmatic Analysis Capability (APAC) by implementing Agency policies and encouraging best practices, facilitating communities of practice with internal and external stakeholders and subject matter experts, and cultivating the human network of programmatic analysts across NASA and connecting them to high-quality training, tools, and other leadership resources. This includes the following strategies for delivery:
- Act as steward of NASA programmatic (specifically cost, schedule, earned value management (EVM) and programmatic integration functions) policies, capabilities, methods, and tools
- Provide leadership in building the skills of the analytical workforce and developing and promoting improved analytic tools, methods, and data collection techniques for analyzing NASA strategic investment planning
- Maintain the quality, integrity, consistency, and independence of Agency programmatic assessment capability
- Strengthen and nurture the Agency programmatic assessment skill base by providing leadership and policy for programmatic discipline training. Provide implementation support and training to NASA’s programs and projects of programmatic capabilities and policies, such as the EVM Capability processes, scheduling best practices, CADRe, JCL, IBR, flow down of requirements to suppliers, etc.
- Perform programmatic analysis research and EVMS surveillance to continue to improve the programmatic capability processes, toolset, and training
- Institutionalize the collection and use of programmatic data to better understand risk-impacted cost and schedule growth and to improve future estimates.
- Track Program and project programmatic assessment findings and perform research of systemic trends in performance of the Agency’s programs and projects, to shed light onto the effectiveness of the Agency’s policy initiatives directed to improve project performance, and to understand where the Agency might improve core capabilities, project management processes, analysis methodologies, tools, and training resources
- Interface to external stakeholders and working groups such as OMB, GAO, NDIA, CAIWG, and JSSC, to share NASA’s programmatic achievements and lessons learned across the government and industry
NASA Strategic Insights and Budget Branch: SharePoint (NASA Only)