The European Space Agency (ESA)

Providing Project Management Support for the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) Mission Operations Division.

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 and the world.

ESA's job is to draw up the European space program and carry it through. ESA's programs are designed to find out more about Earth, its immediate space environment, our Solar System and the Universe, as well as to develop satellite-based technologies and services, and to promote European industries. ESA also works closely with space organizations outside Europe.

Pcubed is currently working in the Operations Directorate of ESA in the Department of Human Spaceflight and Exploration Operations.

The Challenge

For several years ESAs aim has been to achieve full ISO9001 certification. This process was initiated in The European Space and Operations Centre (ESOC) in 1997 with the first certification obtained in 1999.

Responsibility for the Human Spaceflight and Exploration Operations Department (OPS-H) was moved under ESOC following a re-organization. OPS-H was therefore requested to obtain a certification in order to participate in the ESOC Quality Management System.

In June 2008 the extension of the ISO9001 certification to OPS-H was launched with the following objectives:

To create a quality management system that enables OPS-H to:

• Focus on customer needs and expectations
• Provide clarity of work processes
• Focus on problem prevention
• Provide visibility of actions and results
• Ensure Continual improvement

This certification was regarded as very important as it would enable ESOC to be once again considered fully ISO9001 certified.

The Pcubed Solution

As part of the Project Management Support role for the ATV Mission Operations Division, Pcubed initially participated in the ISO9001 workshops in order to define the steps to take in order to achieve certification. Following these workshops, Pcubed organized the following activities:

• Brainstorming on the key processes of the ATV Mission Operations Division and their respective position in an overall process hierarchy;
• Identification of the processes that were sufficiently documented and those that needed to be documented;
• Identification of the processes that were efficient and those the needed re-engineering (such as Documentation Management, Change Control, Product Assurance)
• Creation of an ATV Document tree showing the documents that described the main processes and their relationships;
• Writing of a Management Plan, a Configuration Management Plan and a Document Management Plan;
• Conducting a document review to identify the document baseline for future ATV Missions;
• Re-organization of the documentation repositories, documentation numbering and Work Breakdown Structure codes, in order to have one unique repository for all OPS-HA documentation with different access levels for staff and International Partners;
• Rationalization of the change control boards and their relationship, which lead to the creation of a board hierarchy and writing of charters for each board to outline scope, activities and participants;
• Two training sessions (French and English) to illustrate all the changes carried out and to familiarize the team with the new processes before the audit;
• Proposing and implementing improvements to close non-conformances raised during the two preparatory internal audits;
• Participation in the external audit to illustrate the OPS-HA Configuration Management, Documentation Management and Risk Management processes.

The Business Benefits

As well as obtaining a certification with no observations and non-conformances identified, the actions listed above enabled the ATV Mission Operations Division to:

• Identify and focus on the services delivered to the customer
• Re-organize and streamline key processes in order to support the ATV-2 mission more efficiently
• Have a better overview of the processes at Department and Division level
• Find documents, minutes, actions, objectives and reports instantly therefore increasing the level of information available to the team and increasing the efficiency of everyday work