Planning a Large-Scale Progression of R&D - a Pilot Study in the Aerospace Domain

A prior case study reported in "Programmatic Risk Balancing" (Tralli, 2003) established the suitability of adopting a lifecycle risk management decision-support tool to the planning of application projects across NASA\´s Earth Science Enterprise. Here we report on a pilot study to gauge the suitability of this same approach for large-scale planning of a progression of research and development efforts in the Aerospace domain. The purpose of the study was to assess feasibility and utility, and to prototype adaptations to the approach as and when such adaptations were found to be needed. The novel challenges posed by this domain included: scale - the overall goal is to plan and monitor $1.5B worth of R&D spread over several years; scope - information spans task-level, project-level and program-level concerns; distributed expertise - the information on which to base decisions requires combining inputs from multiple geographically dispersed, busy people (i.e., they won\´t be available to all meet concurrently, even via a teleconference); and novel problem domain aspects - for example the world continues to evolve as the multi-year R&D efforts take place, so that what might be desirable solutions to aim for this year may be rendered obsolete and unnecessary a few years hence as other capabilities mature, or alternately, may continue to be necessary but less sufficient as demands increase. The net result was promising: the approach worked, and a number of interesting observations could indeed be drawn from the accumulated information. Overall it also pointed to several possible avenues to scale-up the approach, together with some remaining key problems