CMA Presents "How NASA Builds Teams: Mission Critical Skills for Scientists, Engineers, and Projects"

Location: Flight Projects Center Auditorium (Building 321)

Are you tired of overruns, missed milestones, and costly failures? Are you faced with the difficult tension between cost/cost growth and risk reduction? As someone once said, "We will begin to lower costs when we give project managers medals for cheap failures." Space projects have reliable processes for managing technical and programmatic risk in the form of risk matrices and earned value management. But until recently at NASA, projects ignored the more dangerous risk of flawed team social contexts. Join us as Charlie Pellerin discusses this generally unnoticed form of risk.

Dr. Pellerin is the founder and president of 4-D Systems, which fosters the adoption of shifted team social contexts to optimize the performance of teams. Dr. Pellerin co-invented and patented a magnetometer design that flew on Pioneer 11 and nearly every subsequent planetary mission. As director of NASA's Astrophysics Program for a decade, he managed the Hubble Space Telescope that launched with a flawed mirror. He then led the space repair mission that fixed the telescope. Following his NASA tenure, Dr. Pellerin joined the University of Colorado's business school as a Professor of Leadership and taught undergraduates and MBAs. In 2009, Wiley published his book How NASA Builds Teams: Mission Critical Soft Skills for Scientists, Engineers, and Project Teams. Dr. Pellerin received a Ph.D. in astrophysics from The Catholic University of America.

This event is free. All members of the Campus and JPL

communities and retirees are welcome.

This event is sponsored by the Caltech Management Forum (CMA), a leadership forum. Details: http://cma.jpl.nasa.gov/upcoming.html.