The Importance of a Risk Management Process for Structuring the Conversation

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's (GSFC) multidisciplinary mission teams design and build complex spaceflight hardware and software that has never been built before. Because of the complexity, project teams require expertise at both designing the subsystems and integrating these subsystems into complex spacecraft. By framing the Risk Management (RM) Process as a "boundary object", we explain the important role that RM plays in structuring the communication around critical risks for the mission. A boundary object, or common model, is frequently cited in interdisciplinary academic research as a critical tool for enabling communication and integrating knowledge from different disciplines. Reilly et al. (2021) provides four requirements that a boundary object needs to have to be useful for interdisciplinary projects: 1) The boundary object must be flexible enough for multiple disciplines to contribute to the same model, 2) The boundary object must allow for the inclusion of uncertainty, 3) The boundary object must allow for both quantitative and qualitative information, and 4) The boundary object must include a temporal dimension for the model that reflects previous experiences and knowledge gains. In this paper, we will explain how a strong RM process meets the criteria to be a boundary object and provides the corresponding benefits of providing structured communications and integrating knowledge for an interdisciplinary spacecraft mission team. We provide examples of benefits of a RM process (including the importance of convening Risk boards at regular mission intervals) to serve as this critical boundary object not only for missions but also at the center level. Sharing risks and communicating across missions at the center level introduces an entirely new perspective on interdisciplinarity. Facilitating communication across the inherently interdisciplinary teams at GSFC is necessary to successfully develop the next state of the art space mission and a strong RM process is a central tool to help.