The European Space Agency (ESA)

Pcubed created a simple, comprehensive web-based collaborative tool for effective communication among the global team.

The Client

The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe's gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe's space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe. By coordinating the financial and intellectual resources of its 16 Member States, it can undertake programs and activities far beyond the scope of any single European country.

The Challenge

The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is Europe's most advanced spacecraft ever built. It is an enormously complex project involving teams working remotely from Europe, Russia and the United States. Key to the success of this critical endeavor is effective communication across a global team. Continuing the long-term relationship with ESA, Pcubed was engaged by the ATV Operations team to reengineer processes and tools to enable a world-class communications capability.

Other key challenges included:

• The development of a centralized actions tracking system
• A central configured document repository
• Ability to raise and track anomalies in Vehicle Control Procedures

The Pcubed Solution

Together Pcubed developed a simple yet powerful solution drawing on the capabilities of web-based collaboration tools. The solution provides a central, shared and secure workplace on the web for project teams to do work regardless of their location.

It offers a distinctive knowledge-shared environment. One that enables the team to discuss ideas, share information and make decisions collaboratively. The solution specifically delivered the following features and benefits:

• Actions Management helped centralize tracking which improved that overall coordination of the team's efforts
• Document Exchange created a central configured document repository reducing the time taken to baseline documents while minimizing errors by eliminating out-of-date versions
• Anomalies Database provided the ability to raise and track irregularities in Vehicle Control Procedures allowing for quicker review timescales, less errors and rework through untracked anomalies

Key elements of the solution included:

• The successful delivery of a complex global project
• The creation of an effective communication capability to prevent teams from becoming hamstrung by conflicts, rework and delays, all of which put the delivery of the project at risk
• The development of a management system that fosters an effective global team concept, contributing to an increased capability for project success