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Everything I Needed to Know About Project Management I Learned in a Cockpit

By Ray W. Stratton In a national survey, nearly 2,000 project managers reported that only 47 percent of their projects met their goals and only one-third said their projects are often completed on time and on budget.

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How Do You Make Good Managers Better?

By Michael A. Spatola In the middle of winter in 2005, Art Pyster, SAIC’s director of systems engineering and integration, sponsored a companywide workshop to develop strategies for improving workforce management and collaboration.

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Growing Space Systems Engineers: The Key to Realizing the Vision for Space Exploration

By Robert D. Braun Now that NASA is headed back in the direction of becoming a space flight development agency, the Agency’s need for highly capable space systems engineers is greater than it has been since the end of the Apollo program.

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MITRE: The Collaborative Landscape

By Julie Gravallese, Ren Resch, Jean Tatalias, and Don Cohen The MITRE Corporation’s goal is to “bring the corporation to bear” on critical national problems — to apply all its relevant knowledge and experience to each of the complex projects it takes on for the U.S. government.

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Learning to Drive the Mars Rovers

By Brian Cooper Learning to drive a Mars rover is no easy task. It’s not a process you can just read up on and do right the first time. For one thing, there is the time lag to contend with.

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Communicating Science

By Dr. Richard E. Shope III The enterprise of scientific inquiry is an adventure of going where curiosity beckons. Scientists generate questions, propose explanations, carry out investigations, and communicate their findings. Communication within a scientific discipline has its own challenges, but cross-discipline communication is especially rich in difficulties and pitfalls.

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Finding a Way: The Spitzer Space Telescope Story

  By Johnny Kwok On August 25, 2003, at 1:36 a.m., I was sitting in the Mission Director Center at Cape Canaveral.

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Imagining the Future

By W. Scott Cameron In 2004, I was part of a team developing the agenda and session topics for a Procter & Gamble engineering community of practice meeting. This major, two-day, biannual event brings all project managers and related disciplines (construction, cost engineering, capital finance, capital purchasing, and scheduling and planning) in the company together […]

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Performance as Promised: Chandra X-Ray Observatory

By Keith Hefner and Greg Davidson The Chandra X-ray Observatory inherited a legacy of good lessons from the Hubble Space Telescope, and nearly the entire team as well. Since we’ve all worked together for years on Hubble, Chandra began with a great team environment and incredible communication, so we were prepared to handle upcoming challenges.

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