Risk identification and scoring in early-lifecycle concurrent engineering teams

Due to the highly constrained schedules and budgets that NASA missions must contend with, the identification and management of cost, schedule and risks in the earliest stages of the lifecycle is critical. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it is the concurrent engineering teams that first address these items in a systematic manner. Foremost of these concurrent engineering teams is Team X. Started in 1995, Team X has carried out over 1,000 studies, dramatically reducing the time and cost involved, and has been the model for other concurrent engineering teams both within NASA and throughout the larger aerospace community. The ability to do integrated risk identification and assessment was first introduced into Team X in 2001. In this paper, we describe how the Team X risk process is evolving, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches.