By Ray Morgan Background For the longest time, we were not procedures oriented at AeroVironment. One guy at the top typically wrote flight procedures, and often that guy would leave out a whole bunch of stuff because, after all, he’s just one guy… there were things he didn’t think about.
By Terry Little Most managers I know think that constructing a schedule is primarily a technical activity. I have found over the years that creating a realistic schedule for a complex project is mostly an art — one requiring lots of intuition, judgment and guesswork.
By W. Scott Cameron In Part 1 of this article, I asked you to think of the Project Manager’s (PM’s) job in terms of an hourglass.
By Terry Little Prelude to a Mistake I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my career, but the one that I think of as providing the greatest learning opportunities occurred while I was program manager of a large Department of Defense (DoD) project designated by Congress as an acquisition reform program.
By Michael Jansen The Voodoo Crew It wasn’t too long after I agreed to be the Thermal Integration Manager for the Space Shuttle Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM) program that I gained an appreciation for why the thermal community was always viewed by the Shuttle Program Office as a group of “out-there” voodoo practitioners.
By Ray Morgan Before we went to Hawaii to begin flight tests on the Pathfinder solar-powered airplane, we knew we needed the support of the local community there.
By Jenny Baer-Riedhart Crash and Learn I made several appearances at NASA Headquarters (HQ) to brief higher-ups on the status of my program when I was the program manager of a Joint Sponsored Research Alliance (JSRA).
By Michael Skidmore To say that the Russian Space Program’s (RSA) approach to space flight is different than NASA’s is at best an understatement.
By John Brunson In preparation for the February 1996 re-flight of the Tethered Satellite System (TSS) payload, the Marshall integration and test team traveled to Kennedy Space Center to support the Interface Verification Test (IVT) between the satellite and tether connector.
