STUDENT 3 - NASA Mars Case Study

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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 flaws. In the next section we will look further at what might have caused such severe design flaws in a major project like this. Analysis At first glance, it may appear the NASA project was well backed but that was hardly the case. This project was significantly underfunded and forced to work on expedited schedules that were not anticipated at the project kickoff (Casani, 2000). This was a large cause for the failure, but it was not noted until after the failure of the project. Project teams were established after the operation failed to figure out what went wrong. At that point, it was clearly far to late to address any of the issues that were relevant during the project, but the goal was to understand and address the issues for future operations. The team assessed many failure modes and used a DMAIC method to determine what went wrong with the project (Casani, 2000). These methods they employed after failure did little good to help the project and could have been implemented much sooner to see the issues before they happened. Major Issues There are many issues that may have been a cause for the failure of the project but there are three that stand out expedited schedules, low cost, and lack of risk analysis (Casani, 2000). The project was expected to deliver a similar product to the last mission on just about half cost and a tighter scheduler. Even with the improved technology from the previous missions, this is a huge stretch no matter the goal. On top of that, the program had limited staffing that was being overworked greatly (Casani, 2000). It was easy for people to overlook simple mistake when they were working sixty to eighty-hour weeks on a regular basis. Furthermore, the board of the program was driven to take more risky choices to complete the program because of the low
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