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Milestones
Professional helps manage missions to the International Space
Station
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Automated Milestones
schedules ensure accuracy, save time and money |
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"This is a wonderfully
detailed 68-page Gantt chart of the mission and the 1,000
milestones that will achieve that mission,... but what is the Big
Picture?"
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| NASA's flight managers wanted a one page, "big
picture" schedule for International Space Station
missions. To achieve this, they relied on graphics tools
to draw those one-pagers that are essential to top-level
reporting. The problem lay in sifting
through a database containing thousands of tasks, then accurately
transferring major tasks, dates, and complex dependencies to a
drawing. Checking, cross-checking, and re-checking the
drawing with the Artemis project database was time-consuming, tedious,
costly, and
revealed the inevitable human error. There had to be a
better way. |
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| From
spaghetti-charting to new technology |
| As
NASA demonstrates each year at Inspection Day, their
technology is innovative and creative. When they
see a problem, they create a solution that reaches
beyond available technology. Thus, NASA was about
to delve into the development of a tool that would
accurately and quickly create these one-pagers when they
discovered Milestones Professional. |
| Milestones
Professional was just the project management tool they
were looking for--one that could produce a one page,
presentation schedule of major milestones for a flight
manager's review. But how do you move the Artemis
task data to Milestones? Drawing it by hand would
be a step forward in appearance, but a revival of the
human-error factor. Automation was the only
acceptable option. |
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| Single-source,
automated scheduling |
| NASA, United
Space Alliance, and KIDASA developers put their heads
together to create a custom, automated solution.
Milestones Professional already possessed automation
capability; they added just a few more commands to
accommodate the special needs of NASA/USA.
The result was
a Visual Basic program that extracts Artemis
database information to Access tables and then
to Milestones...all with the push of a
button. No more tedious drawings, no more
errors, and no more wasted time.
| The
word is spreading |
| Just
like NASA and United Space Alliance profit from
Milestones Professional and its unique combination of
good looks and substantive power, other contractors,
like Lockheed
Martin, are also realizing the tangible benefits of
automating their schedule output. |
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