THE ROLE OF NON-TECHNICAL VARIABLES IN NASA RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT PROJECT SUCCESS

摘要

Systems engineering standards include a set of well-defined processes to support complex system development. The objective of these processes is to have a defined plan that helps ensure project success and minimize risk. However, recently conducted research has indicated high variability in how individual systems engineering processes correlate with project success in government and commercial organizations. It may be possible to improve the probability of project success by focusing resource expenditures on a key subset of these processes. This research extends prior work that looked at the relationship between system engineering processes and project success at NASA centers by incorporating additional non-technical variables in the analysis. Parallel work on parametric project cost estimating has indicated that non-technical variables such as team experience, funding constraints, and percentage of new design have a significant impact on costs. Our objective is to link these efforts to develop a more comprehensive understanding of project success drivers in complex system development. By focusing this study on NASA projects, expanding the factors examined to include non-technical variables, and continuing to study the traditional technical variables in the systems engineering engine, this work will enable the creation of a guide for NASA systems engineers to apply in tailoring the systems engineering engine to individual projects. As a result, managers will be able to improve the probability of project success by better deploying resources.