NASA: Shared Services Center Beats Expectations, Wins Accolades
The Client NASA
The Challenge Work with NASA to consolidate administrative and support services spread across four functional areas and 10 NASA field centers into a single Shared Services Center.
The Solution In the face of formidable challenges, including Hurricane Katrina, CSC partnered closely with NASA and a subcontractor team to take the NSSC from blueprint to reality.
The Results A year after opening, the NSSC was supporting 20,000 NASA employees and partners, and the NASA-CSC partnership had brought hundreds of jobs to the devastated Gulf Coast area. An independent reviewer noted that NSSC’s systems and documentation were some of the cleanest, most concise and accurate they had ever seen. All this success led NASA to revise projected ROI down from 2.8 years to 2.3 years.
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Many organizations outsource certain business processes in hope of lowering administrative costs while improving service. Not all such efforts succeed. NASA's Shared Services Center — despite challenges of historical proportions — is an example of how to do it right.
An Ambitious Vision
Located on the grounds of the Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Miss., the NASA Shared Services Center (NSSC) is a public-private partnership among NASA, prime contractor CSC and its team members, and the states of Mississippi and Louisiana.
NSSC, which centralizes agencywide administrative and support activities dispersed across 10 NASA field centers, also marks the first implementation of a shared services model in NASA’s history.
In May 2005, NASA awarded CSC a five-year, $230-million contract (with five one-year options) to integrate services in four critical functional areas — financial management, human resources, IT and procurement — in one location. The new center would support 20,000 NASA employees, university partners, applicants and contractors.
CSC was the only bidder with experience implementing its own shared services organization. That experience helped weather the many challenges the NSSC team encountered in taking the NSSC from blueprint to reality.
A Deadly Intervention
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the coast of Mississippi and Louisiana. Without an incumbent workforce in place, the NSSC needed to fill 100 new positions in the storm’s chaotic aftermath in order to open on time.
CSC responded by organizing a job fair at the NSSC site. The event was overwhelmingly successful — more than 1,200 people attended and nearly 600 resumes were submitted. The NSSC opened its doors as promised on March 1, 2006.
By May 2007, still working out of a temporary facility while a new 135,000 square-foot facility was being built, the 350-member NASA-CSC team had transitioned 35 processes to the NSSC, out of a total of 51 in scope. All the transitioned activities were meeting established service levels and operating successfully.
Focus on Speed, Efficiency
Whether supporting NASA’s internal IT infrastructure, facilitating the agency’s drug-testing program, managing training systems or coordinating NASA-wide HR studies, NSSC benefits extend across the board. To give just one example, NASA’s field centers required at least 10 days to process employees’ travel vouchers. The NSSC cut the time to four days. CSC has also brought in standardized toolsets and processes to improve both quality and timeliness of service while reducing process variation and cutting costs.
The NSSC also operates a call center where 20 representatives answer nearly 300 calls from NASA employees every day on issues related to finance, HR, IT and procurement.
CSC uses proven performance measures, metrics and reports to provide greater visibility into timeliness and quality to NASA’s management. With centralization to eliminate cumbersome hand-offs and automation to streamline service delivery, the NSSC brings speed, efficiency and quality — all of which help NASA redirect resources to the agency’s primary mission of space exploration.
So encouraging was the progress in the first year of operation that NASA, which had initially projected a return on investment of 2.8 years for the NSSC, revised the projection down to 2.3 years.
Results, Recognition and Awards From February 27 to March 1, 2007, SecureInfo, an independent contractor hired by NASA, undertook a comprehensive review and certification of the center. The reviewers noted that NSSC’s systems and documentation were some of the cleanest, most concise and accurate they had ever seen. “In fact,” said NSSC’s executive director Richard Arbuthnot, “they were concerned that they must be missing something because they hadn’t seen a system this plain and consistently architected.”
In March 2007, the NSSC was selected as the runner-up for the Best New Shared Services Organization Excellence Award. (Read more.)
