National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Schedule Management Handbook
NASA’s Schedule Management Handbook is guidance for NASA headquarters, centers, laboratories, partners, and contractors.49 The purpose of the handbook is to provide guidance on meeting NASA’s schedule requirements and to describe best practices, concepts, and techniques associated with schedule management. The handbook also details the importance of scheduling in NASA’s program life-cycle management process.
We found few differences between best practices detailed in the Schedule Management Handbook and GAO’s Schedule Assessment Guide. The Schedule Management Handbook focuses on ensuring that all approved and authorized scope is included in the schedule but also states that master schedules should model the total integrated plans for the entire program.
NASA guidance does not require resource loaded schedules, but the handbook does emphasize the importance of loading and assigning resources. The handbook states that resources should be assigned within the schedule itself to ensure proper cost and schedule integration. In addition, NASA guidance stresses that resource loading and leveling is recommended to ensure that the plan is complete and credible; otherwise, significant risk is assumed if a schedule is baselined without first being resource loaded and leveled. The handbook also states that resources can be managed externally to the schedule using a spreadsheet, but it does not describe a process for integrating information this way or for resolving resource conflicts.
NASA’s Cost Estimating Handbook50 describes NASA’s joint confidence level (JCL), a concept not covered by GAO’s Schedule Assessment Guide. The JCL is a quantitative probability analysis that requires a project to combine its cost, schedule, and risks into a complete quantitative picture to help assess whether a project will be successfully completed within cost and on schedule. NASA introduced the analysis in 2009, and it is among the agency’s initiatives to reduce acquisition management risk. NASA’s procedural requirements state that mission directorates should plan and budget programs and projects based on a 70 percent JCL or at a different level as approved by the Decision Authority of the Agency Program Management Council, and any JCL approved at less than 70 percent must be justified and documented.