Case Study 26: From NASA, GAO-13-22, November 19, 2012

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) historically has experienced cost growth and schedule slippage in its portfolio of major projects and has taken actions to improve in this area, including adopting the use of EVM. In 2012, GAO was asked to examine (1) the extent to which NASA is using EVM to manage its major space flight acquisitions, (2) the challenges that NASA has faced in implementing an effective EVM system, and (3) NASA’s efforts to improve its use of EVM.

GAO found that 10 major spaceflight projects had not yet fully implemented EVM. As a result, NASA was not taking full advantage of opportunities to use an important tool that could help reduce acquisition risk. GAO assessed the 10 projects against three fundamental EVM practices that are necessary for maintaining a reliable EVM system and found shortfalls in two of three fundamental practices. Specifically, GAO found that, first, more than half of the projects did not use an EVM system that was fully certified as compliant with the industry EVM standard. Second, four of the 10 projects established formal surveillance reviews, which ensured that key data produced by the system was reliable; the remaining six projects provided evidence of monthly EVM data reviews. However, the rigor of both the formal and informal surveillance reviews was questionable given the numerous data anomalies we found. GAO also found that three projects had reliable EVM data while seven had only partially reliable data. For the EVM data to be considered reliable per best practices it must be complete and accurate with all data anomalies explained.

NASA undertook several initiatives aimed at improving the agency’s use of EVM. For example, NASA strengthened its spaceflight management policy to reflect the industry EVM standard and developed the processes and tools for projects to meet these standards through its new EVM system. While these were positive steps, the revised policy contained only the minimum requirements for earned value management. For example, it lacked a requirement for rigorous surveillance of how projects were implementing EVM and also did not require use of the agency’s newly developed EVM system to help meet the new requirements.

GAO reported these findings on November 19, 2012 in NASA: Earned Value Management Implementation across Major Spaceflight Projects is Uneven, GAO-13-22.