Tapping Agency Culture to Advance Knowledge Services at NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) faces a problem that many program- and project-based organizations wrestle with in an ongoing fashion: Where does your workforce go to find out what they don't know?

Knowledge at NASA means many things, but the driving incentive is to achieve mission success. Most of the missions involve unique requirements and solutions, so expertise must be shared across individuals (often referred to as practitioners at NASA), teams, projects, programs, mission directorates, and centers. This includes codified knowledge, represented by scientific knowledge, engineering and technical knowledge, and business processes, as well as know-how, represented by techniques, processes, procedures and craftsmanship, and the social knowledge that allows for individual and group success within the organizational context.

At NASA, knowledge management (KM) focuses on the policies, processes, and practices that allow the agency to identify and manage knowledge gained by our people in its varied forms. KM specifically addresses how knowledge is created, retained, shared, and transferred throughout NASA and with NASA's partners and contractors. It involves dynamic contextual learning that supports the effective transfer and utilization of knowledge throughout the agency.

Efforts to manage knowledge are nothing new at NASA. Many early attempts were local responses to specific needs, ranging from technical to organizational challenges. In recent years, NASA's stakeholders have identified opportunities for greater coordination and collaboration across the agency as it has increased in complexity. To better understand where to find out what is needed to succeed, a brief history of how NASA has approached the overall knowledge issue will help to illustrate the current knowledge environment and provide indicators as to how the agency is moving forward and adapting to new challenges.

The Watershed Moment of the Space Shuttle Challenger

The journey began one day in 1986 when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded upon liftoff. The Challenger tragedy was a watershed event for NASA, puncturing the aura of competence and expertise that often accompanies descriptions of the organization. Enormous energy and thought went into understanding what went wrong and how to repair the NASA legacy of project excellence.

Out of this climate of brutal introspection was conceived the notion of a Program and Project Management Initiative (PPMI), an entity that was designed to promote project management excellence and competency in advance of NASA's needs through improved training and development services. Why was this improvement in training and development needed?

A Natural Progression of Learning

In 1990, NASA was still a traditional leader in managing large, expensive, long-duration programs and projects. Apollo, Shuttle, Viking, and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) offered technologically challenging programs that allowed practitioners to engage in a natural progression of learning in a more deliberate and hierarchical context.

NASA leadership implicitly understood that the training curriculum represented perhaps 10 percent of the preparation necessary to produce a successful generation of project professionals. The bulk of preparation resided in two critical sources—the sheer amount of time and duration to gain professional experience in the real world of projects, and the unstated but essential reliance on a previous generation of project talent who would naturally serve as mentors, coaches, and experts. In an environment of a few very large programs like HST—with an abundance of project expertise cultivated through the challenges of Apollo and Shuttle—such a strategy was both logical and desirable.

A new era of revitalization for the agency started in 1992 when the NASA administrator initiated a dramatic remodeling of the NASA program and project management infrastructure. The era of managing projects better, faster, and cheaper began with the emphasis on doing more with less. This increased the volume of project work across the agency along with the emphasis on safety, innovation, low cost, speed, and quality.

Tying Mission Success to Learning Transfer

To support this organizational vision, the advent of competency-driven project management development was inaugurated, and centered on a formal career development strategy intended to link critical project competencies to NASA-sanctioned learning and education at the agency level. Such a systematic analysis of curriculum content matched to organizational customer requirements tied mission success to learning transfer that would occur in this larger subset of projects.

In this environment, the original PPMI effort born of the Challenger accident evolved over several years into the NASA Academy of Program, Project and Engineering Leadership (NASA APPEL). Senior management expanded its responsibilities to encompass the overall NASA technical workforce and spearheaded the agency's foray into emphasizing knowledge services for the development of this technical workforce. NASA APPEL emphasized practitioner experience, storytelling, and reflective activities in addition to a training curriculum.

In 2003, a second major mishap rocked the agency when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated in the atmosphere as it prepared to land at Kennedy Space Center. Again, the agency was faced with an existential threat: an unimaginable tragedy that hit at the heart of the agency and the painful aftermath of fixing the problem. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board revealed one particular deficiency among several: that NASA had not demonstrated the characteristics of a learning organization. In response, knowledge services across the agency emphasized captured and shared knowledge through lessons learned, a print product called ASK Magazine, and a variety of general and customized forums that served as incubators for innovation by active communities of practice inside and outside the agency.

Responding to Rapid Change

The current development and refinement of knowledge services are continuing to respond to the rapid pace of change affecting the agency's social, technical, strategic, and administrative systems. Much of this burden is placed squarely on the shoulders of the NASA technical workforce. The responsibility of practitioners has shifted from a pure focus on mission (technical, business, safety, and customer and stakeholder satisfaction) success, to responsibility for a wider variety of functional activities, including business management, commercialization, new technology identification and development, strategy development, and more.

Additionally, at a time when experience and talent is at a premium to achieve mission success, NASA's workforce is increasingly young and inexperienced, and many of the most experienced project managers are preparing to retire. This speed of change has catapulted NASA and other organizations to respond to new challenges through rapid technological innovation, increased interdependence on alliances and partnering, and innovative approaches to capture and channel knowledge.

Capturing Implicit and Explicit Knowledge

In 2011, the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) concluded that the agency needed to ensure a systematic approach to capturing implicit and explicit knowledge. The panel recommended a focal point for this activity, the first agency-level chief knowledge officer (CKO), augmented by a designated CKO at each center and mission directorate. NASA appointed an agency CKO in 2012.

This coordinated effort resulted in significant improvements to the agency's knowledge infrastructure during the first year of knowledge community activity. The policy document governing agency knowledge management has been debated, rewritten, and updated; knowledge services and products have been identified and defined; and the knowledge community has produced an interactive guide to help the technical workforce identify and define knowledge resources across the country.

The agency CKO also has created a set of knowledge services strategic imperatives that apply to both people and systems. It articulates NASA objectives for knowledge and guides the development and implementation of future knowledge initiatives, measures, and metrics, as shown in Figure 1.

In reviewing knowledge management efforts and initiatives in other organizations, the agency community realized that many CKOs have tried to "manage" all the knowledge in their organizations … and failed. NASA undertook several major initiatives over the years that did not achieve their full potential. With the appointment of an agency CKO, a clearer sense of the required approach emerged through interviews and conversations with the knowledge and practitioner communities of practice.

Federated Yet Flexible

The organizational culture at NASA demanded that any organizational KM approach be adaptable and flexible enough to accommodate the varied requirements and cultural characteristics of each center and mission directorate. The agency CKO realized that a federated model for coordination and collaboration of knowledge activities was the best fit for the agency.

The federated approach demands that the NASA CKO function as a facilitator and a champion for agency knowledge services. At the beginning of redefining the strategy and framework, NASA's existing knowledge policy was limited to a singular focus on lessons learned and the proprietary Lessons Learned Information System (LLIS) database, despite the fact that the organization had greatly expanded its knowledge activities over the past several years to include a wider array of services.

This clearly established the need for a new knowledge policy that reflected the breadth of independent knowledge services now in use across the agency. This federated approach resulted in a natural progression to identify, characterize, and define agency knowledge services into a knowledge map, shown in Figure 2. The map helps all practitioners to achieve mission success. It is updated quarterly and briefed to senior NASA leadership.

The Future of Knowledge Services

One way to view the maturation of KM over time is through the lenses of recurring lessons that guide NASA into the future. Lessons can be simple to articulate but difficult to achieve and even harder to maintain, but they can provide clear markers for the future as NASA KM continues to evolve:

• The benefits of knowledge services are often most apparent when the mission is threatened from various sources, such as political, social, technical, and financial. Project reviews and organizational audits also can highlight deficiencies that can be addressed through knowledge services.
• The practitioner often knows best. Work is accomplished through engineering, scientific and management professionals, and knowledge services that organize around the work, and the practitioners are the most valuable.
• It can be dangerous to consider knowledge work the exclusive domain of knowledge professionals. Including all contributors within the organization, practitioners in other government agencies, industry, academia, and international partners is a much more successful strategy.
• Knowledge services imply an active exchange of wisdom and lessons through access to both people and technology. Often there can be a contest between technology and people approaches, but an optimal balance of both is necessary.
• At NASA, storytelling is part of the culture. Every project can be viewed as a story, with a beginning, middle, and an end, with accompanying threats, problems, solutions, and heroes. Telling that story well is a powerful tool for change.

As NASA moves through its fifth decade of service to the nation, it will continue to apply current lessons and learn new lessons to achieve mission success as it adapts to the realities of accelerated change.