The project given to the Space Cowboys team was the “Risk Identification Tool (RIT) for Aerospace Products.” The commercial space market is growing rapidly, paving the way to a space faring civilization. Products designed for space must meet challenging requirements due to the harsh environments in which they operate the need for high reliability, the need to enable repair and refurbishment while in space, and the high cost of complex operational phases. A key driver of feasibility is the ability to identify program risks early in development when the cost to mitigate is orders of magnitude smaller. Delayed identification of risks can lead to program delay and/or failure, particularly for small commercial companies.
Multitudes of existing commercial software tools help aerospace program managers in documenting and tracking their program’s risks. Laurie Wiggins of LJW Enterprises LLC, offers an in person service to help program managers develop, mitigate and track their risks, a much more comprehensive and thorough risk analysis methodology than what is offered by existing commercial software tools. Her goal is to improve her business strategy and replace her in person services with a LJW Enterprises LLC proprietary software based risk identification tool that surpasses what is currently available today. The Space Cowboys assessed the outside stakeholder needs to be a thorough understanding of the marketplace for RIT, where their initial concept for a risk identification interview process can be improved, how RIT can be designed better than competing software tools and what functions in RIT would have the most value added. Answering these needs resulted in a consolidated findings report, survey improvements and a capabilities development document (CDD).