NICS, NASA INSTRUMENT CAPABILITY STUDY - FINAL REPORT (DEC 2008)

NICS, NASA INSTRUMENT CAPABILITY STUDY - FINAL REPORT (DEC 2008)., In July 2007, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Office of the Chief Engineer (OCE) chartered the NASA Instrument Capability Study (NICS) team to determine whether NASA instrument developers are facing challenges that impact the capability to design and build quality instruments or whether there are flaws in the acquisition strategy evidenced by schedule delays, cost overruns, and increased technical risk via design deficiencies. The Study team was also chartered to determine if occurrences seen recently are coincident, but isolated cases or if there were generic issues causing such degradation. If the issues were found to be generic, the team was to offer solutions to recover such capability. The NICS objectives were as follows: 1. Obtain macro-level understanding of problem areas within the instrument development processes (not root cause analysis) 2. Determine problem areas that impact primary success indicators (cost, schedule, and technical performance) 3. Determine specific issues within the identified problem areas that impact a. Instrument development processes b. Primary success indicators 4. Identify potential issues for higher risk or more complex instrument developments 5. Identify common, overarching themes spanning the instrument development processes 6. Recommend options for solutions that address Study themes