STUDENT 3 - NASA Mars Case Study

NASA Mars Case Study NASA Mars Case Study University of the People Dr. Osinubi March 9, 2021

NASA Mars Case Study Introduction Although, many have argued that operations management may not be crucial to success of an operation, almost every case study one looks at would argue the opposite. That is no different in the NASA 1999 mission we reviewed this week. This mission offer lots of opportunities for companies to explore the failures of the mission and determine what could have been done better to prevent the problems that occurred. The overall failure of the mission can be attributed to many things, but it seems that errors in basic operations management technique were an important factor. This case study will show the importance of proper operations management in achieving success. Description of Case To give a little background to the case, NASA had set out to circle and land an aircraft on the planet of mars (NASA, 2020). The shuttles were planned to bring top of the line technology that would advance the understanding of planet for scientist a crossed the world. The mission was planned to advance the knowledge of Mars (NASA, 2019). There were and still are many high priority topics scientist are looking to study about the planet due to its similarities to earth (NASA, 2020). An in-depth plan was created to get the spacecraft to the planet based off a former operation (NASA, 2020). Although the plan originally seemed detailed, it was clearly not detailed enough as the plan did not wield successful results. It was determined in later studies that there were numerous design flaws in the mission that could have resulted in the failure of the mission (Casani, 2000). The ultimate question is what led to the project having major design

NASA Mars Case Study budget (Cownig, 2000). They did not properly assess the risk of the choices they were making because of both the tight schedule and cost. Risk assessment is not particularly costly or time consuming but the results of what comes out of a good risk assignment can be both (Hayes, 2021). Given the pushing factors on the project, they simply could not afford the delay of a risk assessment because there was not room to address the issues. Solutions Ultimately there may have been no answer that could have fixed the issue in this situation because of the extreme pressure that was on the project. If more funding and time could not be received even perfect implementation of the tools, I will talk about below would likely have had minimal impacts. To have success the team likely should have scrapped the project in the initiation stages but they let it go on far too long. If the team was to salvage the project, they should have looked at using a DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) approach (DMAIC, N/A). An approach like this could have provided extreme insights to the failure modes that the project was experiencing. A second method the team should have considered is Value Stream Mapping. This is a method to document processes and eliminate waste (Knaster, 2020). A method like this helps a team focus in on what truly is important to the mission at hand and lets them tune out the unimportant information. Given a mission everything seems important, they needed to prioritize the key factors that would make the mission successful. A final thing the project should have done was a FMEA. An FMEA is a tool that allows for understanding of risk to a program (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, N/A). Once again, a tool like this would help them prioritize what is important to the success of the program and

NASA Mars Case Study determine what problems are the most important to address. It is not well documented that the INASA team used any of the three methods mentioned above all of which could have led to a successful project. Conclusion There are many things that could have been done differently to make a more successful project but were any of these things possible given the state the team was place in? It seems that there was not time or money to support these extra efforts. The team needed to strongly elaborate to their customer about the importance of these tools and operations management to be successful. If the team had the time and money to use the some of the methods we discussed, I think they could have made the project successful but I simply do not think that was an option for the team.