Integrating Problems and Parts at NASA

 

NASA does two things a lot: Create data and integrate it.

The integration was credited with saving NASA $250K in the first quarter of going live. Task completion for referencing parts from problems increased from 23% to 86%. I was awarded a NASA Space Flight Awareness Honoree Award for this deployment - one of NASA's highest honors.

I was tasked as lead designer and project manager to integrate our team's problem reporting system and a legacy part and drawing system for International Space Station. There were small visual changes, but huge efficiency gains for engineering. This was the first production data integration for our group and became the template for future ones. As of 2018 there were more than 20 integrations in operations.

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storyboard

We converted a historically manual text entry for part numbers into a validated links to the authoritative systems using RESTful APIs. The storyboard acted as de facto requirements and as a single point of reference for the customer, developers, and QA. The integration helped the engineering process in 3 ways: 

  1. analysts creating the problem report

  2. quality personnel validating the data in the record before signature and

  3. future users who were looking at this record and wanted direct access to the part. 

 

 

GREAT EDGE CASES

THE PART NAME IS NOT THE PART NAME

During user research, we determined through contextual interviews with the Quality team that the authoritative part name according to the engineering process was the drawing title - not the part name. Most of the engineers didn't even know this part of the process!

  • 76% of part names didn't match the drawing title.

  • More than 30% of parts didn't have an associated drawing. 

Solution: Drawing title was returned through a second API call and used, unless the part did not have an associated drawing at which point we used part name.

 

TBD is actually a real Part Number

Seriously. Weeks of testing and data validation ahead of migrating content to live links missed that TBD was a valid Russian part number (cyrillic characters!?) on the International Space Station. Turns out around 1,100 problems listed "TBD" as a part - you know, the standard code for "To Be Determined."

This was an exact match to our criteria and we created 1,100 links to a Russian part. Oops. Don't worry, we fixed it.

additional Project responsibilities

Integration requirements for prime contractor

Synthesizing user research including creating sequence models

Incorporating feedback from usability tests

Schedule and task assignments to developers