Internet-based Project Management for Human Spaceflight Missions

Abstract

For the development of human interplanetary missions, thousands of industrial contractors, universities and research institutes will need to work closely together. Important project data, such as project progress, performance, deadlines, costs, cashflows and earned values will need to be transferred between contractors and their subcontractors. The technical implementation of these interfaces will be quite challenging, because the project participants often use different project management software. This makes the automatic integration of data much more difficult. As a result, costly and time-consuming manual integration is usually necessary. In order to solve this problem, the European Space Agency (ESA) requires all contractors to use the ESA Costing Software (ECOS). With this software, the invitations to tender can be distributed from the higher to the next lower contractual level until the bottom-line of the bid structure is reached. Lower level contractors send their proposal bid data electronically to the next higher contractor, who can then integrate these data in their proposal bid automatically. Other software packages have extended this method to all phases of the entire project. The main disadvantage is that one particular contractor could theoretically be forced by each of its different customers to use specific software for project management. With the Internet-based project management concept introduced in this paper the conflict between internal and external integration can be solved. All project data can be integrated over the entire project life-cycle across enterprise boundaries and over different hardware and software systems by using the Internet. Both the invitation to tender as well as the development of proposal bids on each contractual level can be conducted by e-procurement tools.