Andres Almeida (Host): Welcome to Small Steps, Giant Leaps, a NASA APPEL Knowledge Services podcast. I’m your host for today’s episode, Andres Almeida. In each episode, we focus on the role NASA’s technical workforce plays in advancing aeronautics, space exploration, and innovations here on Earth. Effective program and project management is a crucial, core element of NASA’s success. The agency is a recognized global leader in program and project management and the long-term planning that space exploration and science and aeronautics research requires.

Today we’re going to speak with Dave Mitchell, who is NASA’s Chief Program Management Officer. Dave is the first person to take on this role, and he draws from extensive experience as an engineer and project manager in an impressive career. Prior to coming aboard at NASA Headquarters from 2015 to January 2021, Dave was a director of Goddard’s Flight Projects Directorate where he was responsible for overseeing a portfolio which included more than 80 missions from small satellites to flagship missions like the James Webb Space Telescope. Dave has been a project manager for the GOES, MAVEN, and CAESAR projects and has also served as a director of the Engineering and Technology Directorate at NASA Goddard. We’ll ask Dave about the challenges of taking on a new role at the agency, how he set the first areas of focus for the role and how a small staff with a broad mandate is working to improve project management across the entire spectrum of NASA’s programs.

Let’s get started. Dave, welcome and thank you for joining us today.

Dave Mitchell: My pleasure. Good to be here.

Host: For listeners who may not be familiar with the Chief Program Management Officer, when did NASA create the Chief Program Management Officer role and why?

Mitchell: Sure. This was started actually in the summer of 2021 when a Tiger Team was put together by Pam Melroy to look at how NASA was performing when it came to acquisitions and program project management. Tiger Team led by somebody by the name of Greg Robinson, who was the James Webb Space Telescope Program Manager, solicited a number of people to join him on this endeavor at Pam’s request. So he reached out to me. I was at Goddard at the time, Goddard Space Flight Center. Sure it was a new adventure and why not learn a little more at the agency level about these kinds of initiatives and endeavors. It was something that our leadership was interested in looking into. So I said certainly, yes, I’ll join you and continue my day job at Goddard while we are working through this.

So in the summer of 2021 and into the fall, this small group of people looked at and interviewed many people around the agency and how we were doing with acquisitions and program project management. As a part of that and a reason behind this was there was a concern that we weren’t always performing as best we could with our programs and projects and our stakeholders were concerned about this. At the end of the Tiger Team activity, Greg and the team briefed the Agency Program Management Council about what we found out as well as provided a number of recommendations. This was in December of 2021.

Shortly thereafter, I received a call from leadership here at headquarters asking me if I’d be interested in perhaps being – throwing my hat in the ring, I’ll say for the Chief Program Management Officer, which I decided after having worked at 35 years at Goddard, why not? Why not throw my hat in the ring? A little while later, I was selected in January of 2022 to be the first agency program management officer. So that’s how it all started. It’s a lesson to you out there and that case be careful what you volunteer for because you never know where it will lead. In this case, it led to something completely different outside my comfort zone in terms of working so many years at Goddard and now coming to headquarters. But it’s been great. I’m really happy I did it. Here we are over two years into the endeavor.

Host: This is indeed a completely new role, not only to you but to the agency. So what are the challenges of something like that?

Mitchell: You know, so a lot of my many years at NASA were focused on science mission directorate type missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope and so many other activities through the years. And so the challenge for me personally was the other parts of NASA such as aeronautics, such as exploration systems, such as human space flight with a space operations, space technology, and the mission supports. So all these other directorates I had to build new relationships with because I just, quite frankly, had not worked with those groups. So there’s that’s part of the challenge.

But the other part of the challenge is you’re walking into this and people are looking at you like what are you doing for me? So why are you here, you know? And so I had to build those relationships. I kind of joke that I’m an office without money or authority. It’s really an office of influence. So I was asked to come up here and, hopefully with my history, work with the mission directorates on ideas for improvement. So again, it’s more of an influencing type activity. And so that was new for me personally. I was used to be a project manager where you’re in charge. You have the resources, the money, the people and typically large teams. Now I’m working with a group that’s literally a handful of people, and so it’s really leveraging off of the mission directorates and centers and so on to get the work done.

Host: And you’ve had an exciting career in project management at NASA. Could you tell us how your early experiences informed the way you approach this role?

Mitchell: Sure. I’ve been working within the Flight Projects Directorate at Goddard since 1990 and all those decades on projects and eventually got to the point of being a project manager, then toward the end of that period, being a director of the Flight Projects Directorate itself which had over 80 missions in its portfolio, all from early development all the way through operations phases of these missions and everything else in between.

So I had that kind of experience, many, many lessons, good and bad, you know, painful lessons when it came to things that happened on various missions to draw from so that when I came into this agency level, even though aeronautics is quite different than science missions or human space flight, many of the, I’ll say, the tools in the toolbox of a project manager apply irrespective of the mission directorate. So I have a lot of ideas. I can’t say I have all the right ideas, but certainly when I’m in these agency-level activities and working with the mission directorates and the centers and so on, you know, I just pull from my history on ways I solved problems. You know, I’m finding it’s working pretty well, that it does cross over to the other types of missions here at the agency I can draw from my history.

Host: So how did you go about setting your early focus areas for CPMO?

Mitchell: Yeah, so my model for approaching this new job was to really take the results from this acquisition and program and project management Tiger Team that was left off, I’ll say, present it out to the Agency Program Management Council in December of 2021. So fast forward a month or so and I come in new to the job. I took a lot of the recommendations that came from that Tiger Team to lay out here’s the first things we want to go after.

So we were very interested, for example, in the areas of program management, project management, community of practice. We were very interested in pursuing how do we best go about early acquisition, early formulation? How do we work through independent assessments so we’re making sure that these high dollar value programs and projects are being looked at from an independent viewpoint to help inform our leadership as we run it down the tracks? How do we really look at the best ways to make sure project management performance, costs, schedule, technical, safety, all these things are embraced to the best of our ability? Certainly the kind of work we do at NASA is many times one of a kind or high risk, and so there’s discoveries along the way. So there are going to be surprises, but what can we do in the early formulation phases to make sure that we’re set up for success as best as possible? So again, I took from the Tiger Team recommendations, areas to go pursue.

Then as a part of that, I also had to bring on a few people. So I quickly brought onboard people from other parts of the agency. Several were within the headquarters building. Others were from the centers. And we brought this group together, and we’ve been at it for two years now and really excited about the progress we’ve made not only on what was originally recommended from the Tiger Team activity but also new initiatives where I feel like we’re a continuously learning organization; and we identify areas that need work, we’re going to go pursue it and we pursue it with vigor.

Host: One of your focuses is developing a NASA-wide project management community of practice. How do you intend to build and strengthen these connections?

Mitchell: Yes, this is really one that’s so important, and it’s so important for our next generation in terms of developing that community of practice. But several areas we’re pursuing in this regard is we have something called the PM Coalition, Project Management Coalition; and it’s a community of practice that’s well over a hundred people from around the agency that are either active project managers or project manager pipeline people, I’ll say, people that are coming up aspiring to be project managers. They get together on a regular basis to talk about best practices and just good ideas. What I’m excited about is it’s people that are represented across all the centers and all the mission directorates. So I’ve been concerned in the past about some of our, I’ll say, siloing of our communities; and so now we’re breaking down those siloes and we’re working across those. So I’m excited about that part of it.

We have something called the PM Symposium we initiated last year. The very first one was at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena in May of 2023. It brought together a community from, again, around the agency and over a couple of days various practitioners who had presented lessons learned, ideas, best practices. Not only that kind of activity but also just the cross pollenization, having people in the same place together to share ideas, I think, is so important. The other thing I really am excited in that regard is that we hold that the same week the agency has a Cost and Schedule Symposium put on by the chief financial officer’s organization.

So at JPL last year we had people going to one or the other; and during the course of a couple of days, you’d look at the agenda, you’d cross over to the other group and hear some of their activities on the cost and schedule side. Of course cost and schedule is so integral to project management, so I thought it was great to do that. This year we’re going to do it at the Langley Research Center in April; and so, again, it will be that same kind of community but it’s only grown; and I’m excited about the people that are coming out to this, the prominence of some of the speakers, you know, that are from some of our largest missions in the agency as well as the smaller ones. And we have people coming from the independent assessment communities that are supporting us there as well. So really looking forward to the April edition of this year, and we intend to continue to do this on an annual basis.

Another area that we’ve been working with the PM Community of Practice is in something called the Program and Project Management Board. This is a group that’s been brought together that meets on a monthly basis and it is comprised of people from around the agency. Every center is represented. Every mission directorate is part of this as well as some of the key offices at headquarters including Chief Engineer, Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, contracts, legal. We come together on a monthly basis in this activity; and we talk about, again, lessons learned. We talk about as we’re setting up a new program how we want to tailor requirements, and we present out to this group and get feedback. So it’s a two way street. It’s allowing the whole community across the agency to hear how one program might want to operate. It’s proposing they operate, but it also gives that one program the opportunity to hear from these other groups about how they would do things. So I love the intellectual discussion there and we come out with great products. So I’m excited about what’s happening in that forum.

Another thing I want to mention is we’ve reinstituted something called the Program Management Excellence Awards. And this is something we want to do on an annual basis. The last time this happened at an agency level was actually I believe back in 2017. So we brought this back into play and we’re looking to make selections and present the awards at the PM Symposium that I just talked about and it’s for early career, pipeline type PMs as well as actual PMs that have been doing some great work as well as project management teams.

So the other thing I like the synergy with the PM Symposium in this regard is the people that are selected as Project Management Excellence Awardees have the opportunity to share their own lessons from their experiences at the PM Symposium. So really excited about that prospect.

Host: And in Project Management it’s important that “schedule is king.” How do you approach that mindset?

Mitchell: This goes back to my days as project manager on a particular Mars mission called MAVEN. And like any Mars mission, we have roughly about three weeks to launch; and if you miss that launch window, you have to stand down for 26 months until Earth and Mars are in the proper relative location that we can efficiently get to the Red Planet. So that sets the mindset up that every day is gold, schedule is king; and it doesn’t mean that we cut corners. It means we are very much active on getting to decisions and getting to them quickly and moving on. It doesn’t mean if you make a decision that didn’t quite work out the way you hoped, you circle back and you do something else; but the fact that you know you have a planetary window staring at you really pushes that along.

And the other part is that I and the team were very intentional about clawing back schedule reserves. So we’re in the middle of building this spacecraft, putting it together; but every day we’re looking at, okay, where can we do better? Where can we find more efficiencies? Because we’re going to have problems. We know every project has technical challenges along the way. So if you can mine for gold, schedule gold, earlier, you need to be active at it every day. So that’s my mantra, and really it doesn’t have to be a Mars mission to operate that way. Even if it’s an Earth orbiting mission you could launch any day of the year, if you have that kind of mindset, guarantee you’re going to get to the launchpad earlier in that regard. So I’m constantly pushing for how we can be more efficient, how we can tie off decisions quicker and it can be as simple as just standard review gates.

I’ll give one specific example. If you’re walking into say a preliminary design review and you have a scheduled three-day review, what I would do with our review team chair, the independent reviewers, I would say, “I know we’re scheduled for three days but I want you and your team to stay with us for a fourth day.” The fourth day is just work through all the action items that were identified in the previous three days and see if we can work off as many as possible. And it saved us a lot of time with the team that we could – in the same week with everybody together, we’re not chasing down people months later trying to get something closed off. We got to here’s the answer and if they accepted it, we were done with it. So it’s those kinds of things that I would do when it came to schedule is king. But I don’t want anybody to think that the safety aspect, the technical excellence was secondary. It wasn’t. It was just a mindset of getting to the decisions quicker and clawing back reserves as you can.

Host: Why do you want to focus on the commitments made at key decision points?

Mitchell: Our external stakeholders were increasingly concerned about some of our project performance. One of the keys behind meeting our commitments is what we sign up to. So we have these gates or big lifecycle reviews, like a preliminary design review or critical design review, et cetera. And then following these, we’ll also have something called a key decision point which is a briefing to agency leadership that explains here’s our mission, here’s how we’re doing technically, here’s how we believe we’re going to be able to execute cost, schedule, et cetera. We have an independent group that also comes in and says, “Here’s what we think about how they’re doing.”

So the biggest in my mind when it comes to meeting our commitments, the biggest event is something called the key decision point C which is also known as the confirmation review. It is when we set the line for Congress, OMB, GAO, all these external stakeholders, here is what we’re saying we can do this mission for dollar wise and when we can launch. And our associate administrator has to sign up to that. We’re all a part of that. So we’ve got to get it right at that juncture. So there’s a lot of work we do. My office in concert with the mission directorates, with the centers, with agency leadership to ensure we’ve got that right. And so we put a lot of energy into making sure that we really accept the project’s position when it comes to the cost schedule and the technical feasibility of pulling this off. So I’m proud of what the community has done over the last couple of years; and they’ve been doing it for, quite frankly, decades. But I think we’ve really honed it well for future KDPCs.

Host: Dave, you have a very small staff and a broad mandate. How do you determine which activities you take on and which ones are out of scope for your team? How has your team obtained successful results?

Mitchell: Yeah, I do have a small staff. They are very, very capable, seasoned people, a lot of great expertise so certainly lean on that. But we have to do it in concert with the mission directorates and the centers and the offices. So it’s a team sport and the team sport is well beyond my office. And so, what we do is first off when I came into this, I do focus on starting with the Tiger Team recommendations and certainly those areas are what we pursued in the beginning.

Every year since, in the last two years, I’ll say, I’ve come back to the APMC, the Agency Program Management Council, to tell them here’s what we did in this past year and here’s the ideas we want to go pursue in the next year. What do you think? You know, so we get direct feedback every year from the agency leadership. When I say leadership, I mean the mission directorates. I mean the A suite. I mean the center directors and the mission directors. So we get that kind of feedback for the initiatives we’re going to pursue in the upcoming year.

The other thing I do with my little team within the CPMO is every six months we get together for a little retreat. The retreat is actually right in this building, but we intentionally unplug from our computers and we find a conference room somewhere in the building and we just talk through what we’re up to and what we ought to be pursuing in the next year in all the themes that we already have under the CPMO. So I’m a big believer in stopping along the way, reflecting on how things have gone, and looking forward to the next phase.

Host: With all that in mind about teamwork, can you tell us about the role diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility plays in the CPMO efforts?

Mitchell: Sure. This is another area of real passion for me. Having worked at Goddard for many years and being a senior champion for one of the – what is called the Employee Resource Groups, one of the communities, I learned a lot in that area and what I’m looking at is making sure we give access to all for these opportunities. These project management positions are high profile, you know very high visibility. They’re certainly tough jobs, but we need to give everybody an opportunity to compete for these kinds of jobs. So I’m certainly looking at how we can do better to position people for competition as well as position them by getting them the earlier career opportunities to come up the curve in these areas that will make them viable candidates to be a project manager. So that’s one area.

Where currently our team is working on something called a barrier analysis to try to understand what is causing barriers for certain communities to feel like they can compete on these or why people don’t even, in some cases, feel they want to throw their hat in the ring. We want to get past those and so we’re looking this year at something again called a barrier analysis to see what is causing those kinds of concerns and what we can do about it.

Host: Wonderful. How does a program and project manager’s learning and development contribute to NASA’s overall mission success? Which topics do you think are most important for PMs to learn?

Mitchell: Certainly when it comes to technically complex missions, I think you have to really learn the basics first. What I mean by that is the technical side. Working in environments where you’re actually – I’ll use the term, you know, getting your hands dirty, on the design side or actually on a factory floor or in a test facility. Those kinds of things, will pay off in spades decades later when you’re in higher level positions where you have to make really hard decisions.

That’s one part, the technical side; but you’ve got to learn the contracts side of it. You’ve got to learn how to understand costs, the schedules. Those kinds of things have got to be a part of it too. So you’ve got to have all aspects of it. And you can learn it in different ways. You can learn it by being on, for example, source evaluation boards or performance evaluation boards or developing proposals if you’re part of a team that’s pursuing through announcements of opportunity.

There’s many ways to go about it. There’s just simply raising your hand and saying, “Hey, I want to learn a little more about that. I know I’m a propulsion engineer, but could get an opportunity to do a detail?” And do a detail in like the chief financial officer’s shop and just learn how they do things. You know, take those opportunities and you’d be surprised, you know, people will say yes more often than not. Or simple things like, “Hey, would you mind if I went and shadowed somebody for a little bit? Or went over to this project and sat through a risk management board?” Learning that side of a project will really help down the road. So it’s all these elements and, you know, give yourself some grace. Be patient. But every year think about, okay, what do I want to learn? What should I be pursuing? Whether it’s some extra educational courses you might go after or just experiential opportunities, but definitely get beyond the technical and get to the cost schedule, risk management, all those elements to be a part of being able to be a full project manager.

Host: Can you tell us how independent assessments play a role in effective project management and mission performance? Where do you see opportunities to strengthen independent assessments?

Mitchell: Yeah, this is really critical to our agency, our program’s successes. We can get in a position where, you know, a project manager – I’ll speak for being a former project manager. We could sometimes be naturally optimistic. We can definitely do this job for this amount of money and this amount of time. But I think it’s so important from some outsiders and, you know, you could say healthy tension, unhealthy tension, or natural tension, I’m not sure what it is but to have somebody that’s looking at something, at key checkpoints along the way and help you. I always found an independent assessment team for me personally on a project to help me and the team succeed. You know, they were not adversarial. Sometimes it felt that way, but they were there for your project’s success. So I treat it as such, and I listened intently to what they had to say. Didn’t always agree but that’s okay. You know, they’re independent.

So we’re doing some things in that regard including we’ve developed within the CPMO group, just like I was talking about the Project Management Community of Practice, we developed something called an Independent Assessment Community of Practice. So we’re bringing in the standing review board chairs, the independent review team chairs, and having conversations with them. I took it upon myself this year, I’ve started interviewing one-on-one these independent assessment team chairs to get their perspectives on how things are going with the program. And right now I’m focused on the very large mission class, and I’m learning a lot from that activity. It’s amazing. You just set up 30 minutes time, how much you can learn if you really get out of your comfort zone and just, “Hey, I just want to hear from ya.”

Host: Tell us about a program or project manager who influenced your career or your way of thinking.

Mitchell: Sure. There’s a person that I worked with since the late 1990s by the name of Marty Davis. He came from Goddard. He had spent decades in program or project management, and I learned so much from him in multiple ways. One of the stories I recall that just stuck with me was the way he interacted with the program manager, his counterpart on the contractor community. He was in the middle of a really, really tough project execution phase with a particular contractor organization. And so he literally moved across the country, midway through the country and basically set up shop where this contractor was developing this system and got to know the group. He brought some other people and they lived there for a couple of years on and off going back and forth back home.

But one day he was at the facility, and he was just reading the local paper, and he said there was an article in there. It said, “Hey, come on downtown. We’re giving away elephant rides.” Literally, elephant rides. And so he looked at his counterpart and he said, “Come on. We’re going downtown. We’re going to go ride an elephant.” His counterpart is like, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Just come on, let’s go.” So they went downtown and the two of them got on the back of an elephant together and rode it around. What he said to me is, “Once you’ve ridden an elephant with your counterpart like this, your relationship it’s never the same and it’s never the same in a good way. You know that’s something you’ve taken that journey together” and it just it worked. I mean that’s just one example of his style. We’re all in it for the same reason, for the mission’s success and just being a part of that together.

Host: In April 2024, you’ll be hosting the Second Annual PM Symposium at Langley Research Center. What should participants expect to learn from this event? And will there be elephant rides?

Mitchell: I will say there probably will not be elephant rides unfortunately, but maybe there will be one or two other really fun activities. I just haven’t figured that out yet. That being said, for starters, we’re going to hear from various mission directors, project managers. What I like is, again, we’re breaking out of the siloes. We’re cross-pollinating. We’re working with, you know, people from the aeronautics side to the human space flight side to science to space technology. Excited about those opportunities for learning. You’re going to hear lessons learned. Probably most importantly, you’re going to network and this is another area where I think we could do better as an agency. That is crossing those lines and perhaps with these networks, getting say a project manager that’s worked his or her whole career in science to be able to go work for a while on a human space flight endeavor or vice versa. So we’ll start making those connections and not just start. We have been making those connections, but it will give people an opportunity there to do that.

Host: In a recent episode on this series, Janet Karika, our former Space Transportation Advisor, mentioned she briefed your team about Artemis I. How have you advocated for sharing lessons learned among programs and projects?

Mitchell: I think it’s so important that we look at how we’re doing our lessons, not only collecting them but how we’re distributing them. And so I’d use this visualization in the past to describe my frustration. This goes back years ago, but if you see the last scene of the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Ark of the Covenant is being moved into a large government warehouse never to be seen again. Sometimes I feel like we’ve been like that with some of our lessons learned in the past. I don’t feel that today. I think we’ve done a lot with our partnership with the chief knowledge officer. It came before I came up to this role, I’m just saying. But the chief knowledge officer here at the agency, at the centers and the mission directorates, I think we’re really doing well in that regard right now; but it’s a constant challenge on how best to – and the new mode of communicating with the next generation. What’s the best way to get these lessons out to people? So that’s an important part.

Host: Do you have any closing thoughts?

Mitchell: Sure. For starters, in the world of program and project management, it is some of the most exciting work at NASA. I mean astronauts, yes, that’s the top, I gotta say personally; but I’m never going to get there; but I’ve had the opportunity to be a project manager and there’s something about that, you know. Yes, it’s intense. There’s long hours but the payoff is in working on these amazing missions. Sometimes I’m like I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this job, to deliver this kind of mission, this kind of science, or if you’re delivering – sending people up to do amazing things out there. What a thing to be a part of something like that.

And just as importantly, not only the mission, the excitement of the mission but it’s to be working with these kind of high performing teams, incredibly smart, motivated, energetic, just I’ve loved that part of project management. So for those that are considering it, yes,  – sometimes it’s not your best balanced – work/life balance, you know, depending what kind of problems we’re having in the middle of integration and test. You might have a phone call at midnight on a Saturday night. You’re having a problem in the middle of thermal vacuum testing, what do we do about it? Those kinds of things happen.

I think it’s such a wonderful part of being part of the NASA mission. It’s not just the project manager. It’s the hundreds of people that are working for that common goal. That’s what I’ve always loved. And to be there on launch day and all of that team is together for that moment, it’s just incredible. So I’ve been blessed, privileged to be a part of this agency for well over three decades; and I just hope everybody that wants to pursue this kind of thing, you know, jump in and enjoy it. It’s just been so special for me personally.

Host: Excellent. Dave, thank you for sharing your time with us. Really appreciate it here.

Mitchell: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Host: Thank you for listening to Small Steps, Giant Leaps. For a transcript of the show, more information on Dave Mitchell and the topics we discussed today, visit our resources page at APPEL.NASA.gov/podcast. While you’re there, check out our monthly publication Insight and our quick webinar series. As always, thanks for listening to Small Steps, Giant Leaps.