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You Don’t Have to Crash to Have Impact

By Sylvia Cox As Deputy Mission Manager on Lunar Prospector (LP), I had periods where the cost constraints and the inherent difficulties of space hardware development made me wonder if we were going to get this project off the ground.

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Tangled Up in Reviews

By Marty Davis Start Dreaming Let me tell you about a dream I have. This is one of those dreams with a capital D. It’s not the kind of dream in which you wake up feeling refreshed and well rested; rather, this is the kind of dream that keeps you up at night, wondering how […]

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From Planned Football to Spontaneous Basketball

By Dr. Alexander Laufer Every year, all North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members prove their ability to repair the military airfields that support the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). Teams have exactly three hours to complete the more than 140 tasks necessary to get the airfield operational.

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From the APPEL Director: A Furious Hunger

By Ed Hoffman Societies move by great people. Behind every accomplishment is a person who had a soaring presence to energize the rest of us to do great things. Carolyn Griner has been one of those people for NASA.

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In This Issue: Flexibility, Adaptability and More

By Todd Post Ideally, no project would ever change from planning to implementation. That means no requirements revised, no budgets revisited, no schedules missed, no personnel reassigned, no reason to worry… at least on paper… right!

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ASK Talks with Joan Salute

Often when people think about what is it that makes for a successful project manager (PM), they think, ‘Well, she should be able to do this, this, this, and this.’ What they’ve got is a list of things.

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All Requirements Are Not Equal

By Todd Post In my last Conference Report, I told you about the KS East and West Meetings in December. March 12-15 found KS Participants back in Atlanta for the East meeting and, instead of San Francisco, we were in Pasadena this time for the West.

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Better: The Enemy of Good Enough?

By John Allmen Background In our zeal to solve problems in new and innovative ways, project managers must be prudent not to allow requirements creep or design solutions to bankrupt the whole project.

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The Big Briefing

By Terry Little It was my first big briefing as a program manager, a program status briefing to some senior “big-wigs.” I was pretty comfortable because things were going well with the program’s technical progress and schedule. However, I was concerned about the amount of money we were spending.

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