Estimating incremental cost and schedule growth for systems engineering and project management

This paper discusses an analysis of data collected by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) from its recent missions, the NASA Cost Analysis Data Requirement mission, and the NASA Instrument Cost Model instrument databases to identify trends in PM and SE effort. As the systems engineering (SE) and project management (PM) disciplines have evolved in recent years, they have generated a more robust set of processes, activities, and expectations about mission success. These changes are particularly evident in the robotic aerospace mission environment. Recent APL projects have shown clear increases in both the estimated and realized costs for SE and PM activities but no definitive rationale to explain the upward trend. Analysis of other data has not been as definitive. At the same time, cost estimating relationships of the most widely used mission and instrument cost models provide little acknowledgement that PM/SE costs are driven by anything other than hardware (and software) costs nor how management and engineering initiatives, policy changes, or risk considerations are driving PM/SE cost growth. The reasons, we believe, are an absence of data from recent missions subject to the effects of NASA NPR 7120.5D and other policies, earned value and other initiatives, unreliable and inconsistent cost PM/SE data, and perhaps most critically a perceived lack of interest until recently in understanding PM/SE costs. Initial results indicate that future mission cost estimates will use a combination of project participant interviews, characterization of PM/SE initiatives, and better collection and analysis of PM/SE cost data to define models that predict future PM/SE cost increases, enabling more accurate future estimates. Understanding how much PM/SE effort is needed as well as more recent trends and cost estimating relationships (CERs) will ultimately allow more robust and accurate mission planning and tracking of cost and schedule.