The Importance and Benefits of Accurate Data for Cost and Schedule Analysis, Part 3 – Recommendation, Implementation

In Part 1 of the series “The Importance and Benefits of Accurate Data for Cost and Schedule Analysis,” we discussed the criticality and significance of delivering projects within budget and on schedule. In Part 2, we discussed one solution to the cost and schedule data collection process. This Part 3 will end of the series with a recommended implementation.

The Technical Baseline Document can act like a flight recorder for all projects. It describes a project’s mission and approach, facilitates understanding of the driving forces behind cost and schedule, and identifies associated risks. It is a means to collect and track a project’s historical programmatic, technical, and cost information by milestone which helps other current and future programs better perform their cost and schedule estimates.

Best practices for implementing a standardized data collection process would require the development of an archiving system and a standardized template using a common work breakdown structure (WBS), identifying key technical, cost and schedule parameters of interest, having controlled access to proprietary data, and most importantly, collecting adequate data to populate the template as thoroughly as possible.

Here are the key steps for generating a baseline as well as collecting and archiving the data:

1. Establish contractual requirements for collecting historical programmatic and technical data.?
2. Acquire certain required physical material, such as circuit boards and capacitors that must be provided to the developer. The Agency typically serves as the liaison between the project and the development team.?
3. To maintain consistency, establish a template containing general descriptive information about the project, key technical parameters, and project’s programmatic data, such as cost estimates and actual life cycle costs along with schedule, workforce, and risk information.?
4. The data will be captured in the template and will need to be reviewed by a third party within the development team once it is completed.?
5. The completed document will then be submitted to the Agency which will be reviewed by both Project and the Agency before it is finalized.

Using NASA CADRe as an example, the Technical Baseline Document is a three-part document that provides critical data to assist NASA in developing high fidelity cost and schedule estimates for new NASA projects. CADRe provides a detailed snapshot of a project at six milestones: (1) System Requirements Review (SRR) (2) Preliminary Design Review (PDR) (3) Critical Design Review (CDR) (4) System Integration Review (SIR) (5) Launch Readiness Review (LRR), and (6) End of Mission (EOM).

CADRe consists of multiple parts:?

Part A – A Microsoft Word document containing general descriptive information about the project. It serves as a current milestone snapshot in time of the development of a NASA project and describes significant changes that have occurred prior to the previous milestone.?

Part B – A Microsoft Excel workbook capturing key technical parameters that are considered cost drivers, such as mass, power, and data rates.??

Part C - A Microsoft Excel workbook capturing the project’s programmatic data, such as cost estimates and actual life cycle costs within WBS, along with schedule, workforce, and risk information.

NASA’s collection of CADRe documents has already proven very successful in providing a mechanism to:

• Perform data driven analysis,
• Track and explain changes from milestone to milestone,
• Provide data to help perform Joint Cost and Schedule Confidence Level (JCL) analysis,
• Estimate cost and schedule of new projects,
• Build data-driven products to help answer difficult programmatic questions, and
• Calibrate NASA’s cost models to help improve cost estimates for future projects.

All of the data collected by CADRe developers is entered into the One NASA Cost Estimating Database (ONCE). It is utilized as the primary Agency database for programmatic and technical data and can be accessed by all members of the NASA cost and schedule community. It should be noted that NASA’s data collection through CADRe and ONCE is recognized as a best practice by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and other Federal agencies.

In this era of tightly constrained Federal budgets, the ability to deliver projects within budget and on schedule is more important than ever. Data collection is a best practice and a critical element for model development and analogy comparison. It allows projects to build a realistic baseline and crosscheck performance to plan. It is also an important contribution to the success of future missions, who will rely on accurate historical data to build their own realistic and accurate baseline. NASA CADRe represents the gold standard in collecting, archiving, and using historical data; other Federal Agencies and organizations could benefit from similarly robust processes.

?

TuyNhu Tran-Dam currently serves as Senior Project Leader in the Strategic Assessments and Studies Division at The Aerospace Corporation, where she has worked since 2001. Tran-Dam has a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Getting It Rightfocuses on industry collaboration for mission success by sharing lessons learned, best practices, and engineering advances in response to the nation’s toughest challenges. It is published by theAerospaceCorporate Chief Engineer's Office and may be reached [email protected].