NASA Goddard: A Perfectly Satisfied Customer

A close relationship between CSC and its prime contractor, along with a lot of experience, has helped turn the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center into a satisfied CSC customer. No, make that a perfectly satisfied customer.

CSC and Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies (SGT) Inc. earned 100 percent satisfaction scores on their last evaluation round for the Program Analysis And Control (PAAC II) contract at Goddard. "Maybe once every 15 years you get a perfect score," says Gail Regan, who oversees the contract for the Goddard Flight Projects Directorate Office. "It’s something you just don’t see. I’ve never seen it before now."

The PAAC II contract covers scheduling, configuration management, IT services and administrative tasks for Goddard, which builds satellites such as the James Webb Space Telescope. The team received its perfect scores because it never missed a deadline, and it never went over budget. "They haven’t exceeded that budget by one penny," Regan says. "That’s the worst thing you can do in the government. If you go over, you’re dead."

A "badgeless" partnership

			Related Information: Read how CSC Keeps NASA Flying. Learn how CSC Builds NASA’s Supercomputer Super Fast and Super Cheap   Read about CSC’s Aerospace & Defense capabilities and Public Sector services and support. Contact us and let our experience help you produce results.

Regan, who also manages other contracts at Goddard, says CSC and SGT are responsive and manage themselves well. That attribute hinges upon the working relationship between the two vendors. SGT is the prime contractor on the account, with roughly two-thirds the personnel. But despite different tasks that each company handles, there’s virtually no distinction between SGT and CSC employees.

This “badgeless” partnership was evident early in the contract, when the CSC program manager was designated the acting program director of the PAAC II contract for a week while the SGT program director and business manager were out of the office simultaneously. It raised a few eyebrows at SGT, but SGT soon embraced the PAAC culture and wanted to replicate it on its other contracts.

SGT handles tasks like information systems, general accounting, documentation, and general business. CSC tends to do more specialized work for Goddard, like planning and scheduling and configuration management. There are 11 program teams, which can include both SGT and CSC employees. As prime contractor, SGT has fostered an open environment where both groups of employees work together closely.

"Sometimes the employees aren’t even sure if their team leaders are SGT or CSC. That’s how badgeless we try to be," says Lynn Wyatt, CSC’s program manager for PAAC II. A CSC employee’s annual review may be based heavily on her SGT project leader, for example.

SGT vice president Bill Gallagher started out as a CSC employee before being hired as the PAAC II program director. CSC didn’t view it as the loss of an employee, he says, just a better way to meet the client’s needs. "We’re not hung up on which company gets work," he says. "When we do a job, we ask, who’s the best person, not what company are they from "

For Regan, the close working relationship means less complexity for her — she effectively only has to manage one contractor. "Somehow, they have managed to keep it seamless," she says. "You get a constant level of professionalism. It makes for a lot less work."

The advantages of incumbency

All the teamwork in the world wouldn’t make a difference if both contractors weren’t good at their jobs. The PAAC contract, which is opened up for bidding every five years, requires the main contractor to be a small, minority-owned business. SGT fits that description, but it needed experienced help. Because CSC had won the contract two previous times, it was an obvious choice.

CSC has handled scheduling and configuration management for Goddard for more than 20 years. Both are complex tasks. Configuration managers are responsible for creating and maintaining engineering drawings for any satellite hardware to be built. CSC’s schedulers, meanwhile, manage the satellite production schedule down to the hour.

SGT got that scheduling and configuration management experience when it picked CSC; 95 percent of the "new" CSC employees had already been with Goddard working on PAAC II predecessors. Because of this incumbency, says Regan, both CSC and SGT employees know their jobs well, which is part of the reason they meet time and budget goals.

Many of the SGT employees have also been with Goddard for years, which helps both productivity and teamwork. "What really makes it work is that we’ve all been together for a long time," Gallagher says.

Wyatt echoes that. Because everyone has been so closely involved with the contract for so long, the PAAC II team’s first goal is to help Goddard succeed. "Even though we work for different employers, we trust each other," Wyatt says. "We’re not CSC or SGT employees. We’re PAAC employees."