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Strategic Objective

Ensure the safety and success of NASA’s missions.

Strategic Objective

Ensure effective management of NASA programs and operations to complete the mission safely and successfully.

Lead Office: Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, Office of Chief Engineer, and Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer

Themes:

General Science, Space, and Technology

NASA.gov

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Overview
Progress Update

Overview

Safety and mission success programs protect the health and safety of the NASA workforce and improve the likelihood that NASA’s programs, projects, and operations will be completed safely and successfully. NASA’s commitment to safety and mission success extends to the American public, our employees, our commercial partners, and our contractors. We do this through an environment of trust and ethical behavior using diverse multidisciplinary teams that foster equal opportunity, collaboration, and continuous learning. We promote technical excellence and competence while

Progress Update

Through the Strategic Review and the Agency’s other performance management processes, NASA reviews recent accomplishments and near term plans for the Agency’s strategic objectives and programs. Program elements managed by the Office of the Chief Engineer, Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, and the Office of the Chief Health and Medical Officer fall under Strategic Objective 3.4. These program elements together are more broadly referred to as “Safety and Mission Success.” These programs work to protect the health and safety of the NASA workforce and improve the likelihood that NASA’s programs, projects, and operations are completed safely and successfully. During the 2015 Strategic Review, NASA found no major changes from the 2014 Strategic Review assessment, and performance measures for Safety and Mission Success are all on track. In the near term future SMS will continue to ensure effective management of NASA programs and operations to complete the mission safely and successfully. Specific performance measures for the next two years can be found in the FY 2016 and FY 2017 Annual Performance Plans.

The Strategic Review also addresses long-term strategic outcomes, alignment, and key management challenges for each strategic objective, as well as across NASA’s portfolio of activities. A challenge for this strategic objective include the fact that NASA’s mission requires working in many unforgiving environments, including the upper atmosphere, low Earth orbit, and deep space. Safety and Mission Success offices work to ensure mission safety and success given these environmental challenges, but Safety and Mission Success faces resource constraints. Some areas of concern regarding SMS disciplines include aviation safety, human factors, non-destructive evaluation, nuclear flight safety, pressure systems, and technical risk and statistical analysis.

For more information, highlighted achievements during FY 2015 are detailed in the FY 2015 Agency Financial Report. Additional details on the FY 2015 performance for supporting Performance Goals and Annual Performance Indicators are provided in NASA’s FY 2015 Annual Performance Report. Information on the strategies for achieving this strategic objective can be found in the 2014 NASA Strategic Plan.

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Strategic Goals

Strategic Goal:

Serve the public through excellence in NASA's workforce and assets.

Statement:

Serve the American public and accomplish our Mission by effectively managing our people, technical capabilities, and infrastructure.

Strategic Objectives

Effectively manage NASA's diverse assets and workforce.

Statement:

Attract and advance a highly skilled, competent, and diverse workforce, cultivate an innovative work environment, and provide the facilities, tools, and services needed to conduct NASA’s missions.

Description:

NASA’s workforce and institutional capabilities enable us to successfully conduct our missions. We are dedicated to innovation, bold ideas, and excellence, which enable us to provide the day-to-day operations required to support and achieve our missions.

People are our most important resource; without them, no mission can be achieved. We have a workforce that is skilled, competent, and dedicated. Our workforce is committed and passionate, and brings many dimensions of diversity, including ideas and approaches, to make our teams successful. To conduct our missions over the next 20 to 30 years, we must focus on attaining an increasingly diverse workforce with the right balance of skills and talents and provide an inclusive work environment in which employees with varying perspectives, education levels, skills, life experiences, and backgrounds work together and are fully engaged in NASA’s Mission.

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Ensure sustainable technical capabilities for NASA's future missions.

Statement:

Ensure the availability and continued advancement of strategic, technical, and programmatic capabilities to sustain NASA’s Mission.

Description:

We identify and prioritize our essential assets and implement strategic investment decisions to sustain, enhance, replace, modify, or dispose of them based on NASA and National needs. We ensure that our key capabilities and critical assets will be available in the future to support the missions that require them. For example, we provide launch services to NASA and civil sector missions, as well as an uninterrupted, reliable space communications network to allow data transmissions to Earth from space. Both of these capabilities are critical to making space missions feasible, safe, and efficient.

NASA’s technical capabilities and assets support NASA missions as well as the work of others beyond NASA. Other Federal agencies and the private sector use our specialized facilities to test and evaluate items to mitigate risk and optimize engineering designs. We manage our technical capabilities and assets carefully through strategic investments and sustainable practices that ensure their readiness for NASA and other customers.

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Provide secure, effective and affordable IT for NASA.

Statement:

Provide secure, effective, and affordable information technologies and services that enable NASA’s Mission.

Description:

Information technology (IT) is critical to NASA’s infrastructure and mission success. To support NASA’s missions effectively, we must inspire excellence in IT planning and service delivery across organizational and functional boundaries. We must find ways to use information technology that supports a more collaborative, geographically diverse and mobile working culture, keeps our IT skills and capabilities up-to-date to serve NASA’s missions, and protects those missions from ever-evolving IT security threats.

Our approach to IT planning and service delivery emphasizes responsive innovation, transparency, and accountability. In planning, we take an agency-wide view that considers NASA’s diverse mission needs to guide IT policy, investment decisions, and management practices. At the same time, our approach calls for rigorous assessments of investment trade-offs and sequencing to balance the cost, quality, and timing of our IT capabilities to optimize value while limiting mission risk. We will collaborate with NASA leaders to prioritize and sequence our information management investments to deliver the right blend of capabilities over time to effectively and affordably support NASA.

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