STARDUST: implementing a new manage-to-budget paradigm

Abstract

STARDUST is the Discovery Program's fourth mission. It follows Lunar Prospector, Mars Pathfinder and the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission. Launched on February 7, 1999, the STARDUST flight system will collect comet samples during a 6 km/ s flyby of Comet Wild 2 on New Year's day, 2004, and return the samples to Earth in January 2006. Enroute to the comet, STARDUST will also attempt to collect samples of interstellar dust. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) provides project and mission management with Lockheed Martin Astronautics (LMA) as the industrial partner for the flight and ground systems. LMA made strong use of developments in the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) and the Mars Surveyor ‘98 projects preceding STARDUST. Under the stringent cost-caps of the Discovery Program, the STARDUST development was completed on time with nearly $2M remaining reserves to reprogramming into the flight phase. The STARDUST management team aggressively worked to achieve this control through the use of total quality management (TQM) and reengineering principles, and commercially available software tools. The approach was to develop project-to-project interfaces exploiting parts stores and common procurements, shared staffing and shared facilities. Inheriting parts, hardware, software and designs leveraged dollars efficiently to accelerate the development, while staying inside a constrained budget. Additionally, to achieve the required level of time efficiency and budget control, a new level of communications and data handling (read excellent Management Information System [MIS]) is mandatory. Finessing the rigidity of traditional Performance Management (or Measurement) Systems (PMS) and institutional/corporate cultures requires a new way thinking and a cheerleader aggressiveness. STARDUST organized toward the Integrated Product Development Team (IPDT) concept as a central feature. This was matrixed into a dedicated Product Development Office (PDO) at LMA. The PDO served the leveraging goal by serving two projects, STARDUST and Mars Surveyor ‘98. It avoided duplicate project-unique personnel structures and offered cost benefits to each project. This paper provides details and example metrics characterizing the aggressive application of the design-to-cost paradigm and implementation by the STARDUST management team to achieve success under the Discovery Program budget constraints.