With Pinnacle help, the NASA International Space Station (ISS) Program has developed a process for combining schedules from multiple sources into an Integrated Master Schedule (IMS) for the ISS Program using the Primavera P3e module and Pinnacle know-how.
The International Space Station is the largest and most complex international scientific project in history. And when it is complete just after the turn of the century, the station will represent a move of unprecedented scale off the home planet. Led by the United States, the International Space Station draws upon the scientific and technological resources of 16 nations: Canada, Japan, Russia, 11 nations of the European Space Agency and Brazil.
The NASA ISS Program Office, based at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), is responsible for establishing and maintaining the Integrated Master Schedule (IMS) for the ISS Prorgram. This is a substantial challenge, as it involves coordination of many program elements, across virtually all NASA centers and involving the work of thousands of NASA prime and subcontractors. To complicate matters, there are few established scheduling standards across this diverse group of participants, and many of them are using different planning and scheduling tools to manage their part of this complex scheduling jig-saw puzzle.
Among the many tools involved in this multi-level scheduling process were:
The head of the Project Planning Directorate, through their support contractor, ARES Corporation, asked Pinnacle to help them find a solution to this important and difficult challenge.
Working with ARES, who providing integrated scheduling support to NASA ISS, Pinnacle staff helped research and evaluate the schedule integration requirements.
Based on these requirements, we recommended that ARES adopt an enterprise scheduling tool to make the integration and data management problem easier to solve. We recommended the Primavera P3e module due to its powerful scheduling, reporting, integration and data management capabilities.
We then provided training and schedule migration support to the ARES and NASA team. We provided a combination of formal classroom training, tailored to the specific needs of NASA ISS, as well as on-site mentoring by experienced IMS consultants in order to transfer skills to the ARES/NASA staff.
Due to the wide variety of participants in the overall schedule, we helped ARES define certain scheduling standards and conventions that would support the requirements of NASA.
Finally, due to the wide variety of scheduling tools used as sources for the IMS data, Pinnacle developed a set of custom import routines, utilizing the Primavera SDK and API tools, that would:
The resulting process allows ARES to integrate schedule information from all the various participants and in all the various formats. Through intelligent use of coding in the Primavera tool, they were able to generate various sorts and summaries of the IMS to meet NASA reporting requirements.
NASA ISS Program Management was able to see the entire ISS master schedule in one system and could monitor performance and identify potential problems.
Based in part on this clear success, NASA has decided to standardize on the Primavera enterprise scheduling tool across the agency.
Pinnacle has now been asked by the next major NASA program, Constellation, to help them design and implement an effective Integrated Master Scheduling process as well as an integrated Earned Value Management System for the Constellation Program.
