The New Team X
- Paper number
IAC-07-D1.3.01
- Author
Ms. Rebecca Wheeler, NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, United States
- Coauthor
Dr. Mark Adler, United States
- Coauthor
Mr. Brent Sherwood, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, United States
- Year
2007
- Abstract
In 1995, JPL established Team X as one of its “tools” to enable the preparation of more numerous, faster turnaround and less expensive mission designs submitted in response to increased competition for NASA funding. Team X employed concurrent design methodologies to rapidly articulate mission concepts, architectures, requirements and costs. The concurrent design paradigm utilized by Team X involved physical co-location of a multidisciplinary team of engineers in a technologically intensive physical environment to complete a mission design in real time. During the design period, the team focused its attention entirely on completing the design, utilizing their immediate physical and situational environment to support their work. That environment consisted of networked workstations, a supporting data management infrastructure, large interactive graphic displays, computer modeling and simulation tools, historical data repositories, a shared generic project model that the design team updates in real time and spontaneous human interactions to resolve resource or design conflicts. Team X has been a highly successful at JPL, having completed more than 900 studies over the last twelve years. The model for Team X has been extended to other design team structures and their support environments, both within, and external to, JPL. However, over time, Team X’s customer needs have substantively evolved, and JPL is resolved to upgrade to a more flexible and sophisticated Team X. This paper will discuss current and future investments being made to upgrade the new Team X. These include validation and updating of Team X cost models, addition of new pre-session scoping and post analysis tools, extension of existing design processes to include architecture, rapid instrument scoping and minimal ground system designs, addition of more detailed real time design tools and capabilities, the addition of technology exploration options, modeling and simulation capabilities, more flexible team construction, increased and decreased design session durations and significant training of new team members.
- Abstract document