Milestones Professional helps manage NASA's space missions
Automated Milestones schedules ensure accuracy, save time and money
     
"This is a wonderfully detailed 68-page Gantt chart of the mission and the 1,000 milestones that will achieve that mission,... but what is the Big Picture?"

NASA's flight managers wanted a one page, "big picture" schedule for International Space Station missions.  To achieve this, they relied on graphics tools to draw those one-pagers that are essential to top-level reporting.  The problem lay in sifting through a database containing thousands of tasks, then accurately transferring major tasks, dates, and complex dependencies to a drawing.  Checking, cross-checking, and re-checking the drawing with the Artemis project database was time-consuming, tedious, costly, and revealed the inevitable human error.  There had to be a better way.
From spaghetti-charting to new technology
As NASA demonstrates each year at Inspection Day, their technology is innovative and creative.  When they see a problem, they create a solution that reaches beyond available technology.  Thus, NASA was about to delve into the development of a tool that would accurately and quickly create these one-pagers when they discovered Milestones Professional.  
Milestones Professional was just the project management tool they were looking for--one that could produce a one page, presentation schedule of major milestones for a flight manager's review.  But how do you move the Artemis task data to Milestones?  Drawing it by hand would be a step forward in appearance, but a revival of the human-error factor.  Automation was the only acceptable option.
Single-source, automated scheduling
NASA, United Space Alliance, and KIDASA developers put their heads together to create a custom, automated solution.  Milestones Professional already possessed automation capability; they added just a few more commands to accommodate the special needs of NASA/USA.

The result was a Visual Basic program that extracts Artemis database information to Access tables and then to Milestones...all with the push of a button.  No more tedious drawings, no more errors, and no more wasted time.
 

The word is spreading
Just like NASA and United Space Alliance profit from Milestones Professional and its unique combination of good looks and substantive power, other contractors, like Lockheed Martin, are also realizing the tangible benefits of automating their schedule output.

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