The operations department at the GSOC recently started using a new approach for the support of satellite missions. Since 2009, several pools of specialists have been created, that cover all missions instead of having dedicated teams for each project. Each pool groups experts of the particular satellite subsystems (e.g. attitude and orbit control, power/thermal, data, etc.). All pools together form the Operations Engineering Group (OEG), which is managed by the OEG lead, and whose main goal is to satisfy the project needs, using group resources in the most efficient way. To achieve this objective the group lead together with the individual group members, are constantly trying to improve the group performance by optimizing not only the internal structure and the exchange of information with the project managers (the so-called "hard" factors), but also by working on the "soft" factors. The latter are, for example, assigning tasks to the engineers, keeping an eye on employee motivation, communicating inside the pools and the cross-communication between them, encouraging employee creativity, and establishing a group culture. This paper focuses on the OEG's main features. It describes the experiences of the last two years supporting an increasing number of projects using the described approach. The first section gives a general overview of the group. The advantages of supporting operations with different pools instead of using dedicated teams are presented in Section 2. Section 3 describes the challenges faced by the group and the solution applied. The fourth section presents some conclusions, the lessons learned and some possible future applications of this promising support strategy.
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