Cost Estimating Initiatives at NASA
Coonce, T
National Aeronautics and Space Administratino

In this session, you will hear about The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) recent cost and schedule growth experience, root causes for this experience and what the agency is doing to attempt to mitigate these causes in the future. The speaker will describe the agency's rationale for requiring all project budgets to reflect a 70 probability of completing within the requested resources. The author will also describe other initiatives such as the use of a Cost Analysis Data Requirement Document to specify the cost, technical and programmatic aspects of projects as they pass agency decision gates. He will also discuss an "educational outreach" program to explain to project managers and analysts throughout the country their responsibilities with respect to the new policy, some of the basic underlying principles of cost-risk analysis, and cost-research efforts to support the need for more realistic estimates of cost and schedule.