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Contents

• Prerequisites
• Submission Items
• Timeline
  • Systems Engineering
  • Writing It
  • Submitting It
• Writing The PMP
  • General Notes
  • Initial Schedule
  • Initial Budget
  • Initial Technical Objectives
  • Initial Technical Performance Measures

Prerequisites

Before reading this page, read the guidebook because NASA gives tips of their own in the guidebook.

Also, I recommend opening the documents themselves (housed here) to cross-reference while reading this page.

Submission Items

There were 3 items due at the 2023-2024 PMP deadline:

• Statement Rights of Use
• Statement of Supervising Faculty
• Project Management Plan

These documents were submitted in PDF format with the following names:

• Virginia Tech_DOCS.pdf
• Virginia Tech_PMP.pdf

Note DOCS encompassed the Statement Rights of Use and Statement of Supervising Faculty appended one after the other.

There was no "submit" button on NASA's portal. The most recent versions uploaded to the NASA portal are considered the submitted documents.

Timeline

Systems Engineering

Conduct preliminary systems engineering prior to writing the PMP. You will need it to demonstrate an effective project management plan. We had completed an initial:

• Systems Requirement Matrix
• Concept of Operations (ConOps)
  • Note the most substantial task completed here was deciding on mandatory objectives as well as ranking goals (i.e. manufacturability is more important than potential max berm size).
• N^2 Chart

Project Management

Creating the Gantt chart will take a significant amount of time; work on this should begin as early as possible. I started planning the overall 2023-2024 Gantt chart in June/July and it was still a struggle to complete it before the PMP deadline. You'll want to review it and change things a lot as you go, so give yourself time to do that before the PMP. The more thought you put into this, the easier the PMP will go and the smoother the year too.

Writing It

Begin writing the PMP 2 weeks before the due date. Get your faculty advisor's signature EARLY and get their feedback on your PMP before submitting. Also, get everyone's signature for the Statement Rights of Use document once the roster has settled.

Writing the PMP takes 4-8 total man-hours if you actually did the project management and systems engineering the paper is based on. Remember, the paper is supposed to share your project management strategy with NASA, not be some B.S. paperwork.

Submitting It

NASA's portal is GARBAGE. Add members' emails to the portal as early as possible (once you know they will stick around) and do not submit the PMP documents on the last day. The portal goes down or fails to submit things all the time.

In fact, I had to email NASA support and they ended up giving up and sending out the email invitations for our team manually (2023-2024). I was only able to send out 2 invitations myself, despite trying many times in many different ways (different browsers, networks, amount of invites at once, etc).

Writing The PMP

General Notes

Again, READ THE GUIDEBOOK. When writing the PMP, everything should fit the requirements in the guidebook. If it asks for something, even optionally, include it.

NASA is lazy. They will likely speed-read your paper for each rubric bullet and check it off. They’re not looking for poetry here.

Format the document correctly.

• Title page with “Astrobotics at Virginia Tech, Project Management Plan,
  • Big plus if you can make a nice-looking cover page.
• Page numbers starting on the first page following the title page
• Figures and tables should have labels and numbers. Figure labels go below, table labels go above.
• 1” margins, normal spacing, 12 pt font in body, tables can have smaller text if needed, but don’t go below 10 pt.
• Use professional and technical language (“shall”). Write in the proper tenses.
• Use linked tables to make things simpler.
• Tables should go directly below the paragraph in which they are mentioned.

Initial Schedule

This section should be the majority of the Project Management Plan. This included our

• Gantt chart
• Discussion of project schedule, including major project milestones

Tips to make the Gantt chart readable:

• Put on landscape pages
• Use task groups (I believe Microsoft Project calls them Summary tasks)
• It's OK to delete things for the sake of a screenshot
• Stitch multiple screenshots together (this is actually what I did in 2023-2024, though it's not immediately obvious)

Tips on the Gantt chart itself:

• Make sure to add the major deadlines stated by NASA as milestones. There should also be tasks for when to complete the documents prior to the milestone.
• Include tasks for updating the budget. These will be written about in the budget section.

Tips on the discussion:

• Discuss every event, date, review, etc. that NASA says to talk about. Include dates and descriptions.
• Discuss how/when the team will update the schedule. Include tasks in the Gantt chart.
• It is important to give realistic ways the team will account for schedule slips AND accelerations.

Initial Budget

• Don’t provide too much detail in the budget. It’s an initial budget and costs/things to purchase will not be known yet. They want a budget not a BOM.
• Talk about the tasks in the Gantt chart for updating the budget and any other times the budget will be updated (every time items are ordered, funding is received, etc.)

Initial Technical Objectives

• This may be subject to change if NASA makes a major update to the guidebook following the PMP deadline. For example, NASA did not have an official guidebook released in the 2023-2024 year until well after the PMP was due.
• Relate how the objectives will help your team win the competition (maximize points).
• Talk about the primary and secondary objectives and the decisions of why some are of lower priority (hierarchy of objectives).

Initial Technical Performance Measures

• This table is NOT the system requirements matrix. Although similar, the technical performance measures describe the metrics that the robot should have to complete the objective successfully.
• Make these cohesive with the Project Technical Objectives paragraph.
• Include both marginal and target values.
• Include units
• Give justification as to why the TPMs will achieve the objective and the process that went into determining their importance