An Innovative Distributed Project Control Approach: A Case Study of the Cassini Management Information System (CMIS)
Michael W. Hughes, Reed E. Wilcox · Engineering Management Journal · 1996
The Cassini Project, a NASA-funded exploration mission to Saturn that is being managed by the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA, has developed a distributed project schedule control system for complex development programs. The system is called the Cassini Management Information System (CMIS). The system was built to make schedule control simple, user-friendly, and low-cost. CMIS is distributed across a local area network of PCs and Macintosh computers and consists of four major modules: schedule control, action item tracking, work package implementation plan, and budget tracking. This article focuses on the schedule control module of CMIS. CMIS was one of the innovations introduced in response to the decrees of the U.S. Congress, and subsequently NASA, to conduct space exploration on a fixed-price basis. This article summarizes CMIS development history as a schedule control tool, its key features, and its use by more than 130 engineers and managers.