John Glenn, NASA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio

Convening Issues:

How do we create a strategic plan for 5 years from now that truly positions NASA Lewis for the year 2020? How do we align a set of different R&D and scientific endeavors that each operate independently and in silos? How do we create a process that enables us to see opportunities across the functional boundaries and leverage our collective strengths in a way that makes us more competitive within the NASA community?

Critical Succes Factors:

Develop and implement a plan that aligns all of the functional specialties of NASA Lewis strategically; scenarios for the year 2020 that truly push the edges of today's thinking within NASA; align leadership across the Center; people are committed and working together to make the case for funding that cuts across their individual budgets. Produce a vision and strategic plan that is compelling with NASA s to secure the future of the NASA Lewis center.

What We Did:

Leadership Develoment and Alignment:

Senior Management Team (SMT):Over the course of the first year, PDA designed and facilitated the Site Management team's development as an integrated leadership team. This team developed a unified plan to create the strategy, managed the critical interfaces within NASA Lewis and the broader NASA organization and chartered and supported the task teams that gathered the data to support the vision and strategy work. Once the plans were created and approved this team worked together to "sell" the visio and strategy to NASA Headquarters and secure the funding needed to make the efforts successful.

Much of PDA's focus with the SMT was to develop their common understanding of each other and each other's organization, and their meting and working protocols as a new team.

Extended Management Team: This team consisted of a critical cross section of NASA researchers and scientists. Our role was to build the process for integrating with the management team and to design and facilitate a series of meetings that have become the linchpin of strategy development and deployment across the Center. This group developed the futuristic data on which a vision for 2020 could be crafted, enlisted futurists and visionaries to enable other to think out of the box and finally, took the idea's and agreements reached and developed an implementation plan in conjunction with the Site Management

Strategy Development:

Over the course of the year, PDA worked with the Site Leaders and the Extended Management Team to craft the new visio and strategic plan for NASA Lewis. This entailed a series of large group metings that included a microcosm of the Lewis scientists and managers. During three large group meetings spread over 4 months, Lewis Center staff developed 7 very different scenario's for 2020; defined 5 key focus areas for strategic thinking and work (to enable NASA Lewis to be viable regardless of the eventual scenario of 2020), and developed the critical issues implementation plans.

Communications:

System Wide:Many of the extended teams were distributed, often on different continents. PDA designed and facilitated the development of virtual team meetings and protocols for many of these teams. We trained teams in virutal team management and assisted many of them as they established their communications processes and tools.

Listening Checks and Pulse Taking:Over the course of the merger integration PDA designed and facilitated a process by which key informal leaders across the globe who were key opinion leaders (a diagonal cross section by level, company and geography) were surveyed regarding their affect toward the merger, the effectiveness of company communications, and issues and concerns regarding the merger.

Results:

1. NASA Lewis has been able to increase its funding from various sources over 20% when other's budgets are being reduced.

2. NASA Lewis identified 2 new areas of research to the year 2020 that have been overwhelmingly supported by NSAS and by other government agencies as well.

3. NASA Lewis has expanded its scope of work beyond Space and Technology to leverage its competencies in a number of other scientific areas.

4. NASA Lewis has experienced faster implementation on key initiatives asociated with this strategic plan any other implementation effort in the past 15 years.

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