NASA's
flight managers wanted a one page, "big picture"
schedule for International Space Station missions. To
achieve this, they relied on graphics tools to
draw those one-pagers that are essential to top-level
reporting. The problem lay in sifting
through a database containing thousands of tasks,
then accurately transferring major tasks, dates,
and complex dependencies to a drawing. Checking,
cross-checking, and re-checking the drawing with
the Artemis project database was time-consuming,
tedious, costly, and revealed the inevitable human
error. There had to be a better way. |
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From spaghetti-charting
to new technology |
As
NASA demonstrates each year at Inspection Day,
their technology is innovative and creative. When
they see a problem, they create a solution that
reaches beyond available technology. Thus,
NASA was about to delve into the development of
a tool that would accurately and quickly create
these one-pagers when they discovered Milestones
Professional. |
Milestones Professional was
just the project management tool they were looking
for--one that could produce a one page, presentation
schedule of major milestones for a flight manager's
review. But how do you move the Artemis
task data to Milestones? Drawing it
by hand would be a step forward in appearance,
but a revival of the human-error factor. Automation
was the only acceptable option. |
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Single-source, automated
scheduling |
NASA,
United Space Alliance, and KIDASA
developers put their heads together
to create a custom, automated solution. Milestones
Professional already possessed automation
capability; they added just a few
more commands to accommodate the special
needs of NASA/USA.
The result was a Visual Basic program
that extracts Artemis database information
to Access tables and then to Milestones...all
with the push of a button. No
more tedious drawings, no more errors,
and no more wasted time.
The
word is spreading |
Just
like NASA and United Space
Alliance profit from Milestones
Professional and its unique
combination of good looks
and substantive power,
other contractors are
also realizing the tangible
benefits of automating
their schedule output. |
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2019