Luis Cuellar wins NASA Group Achievement Award for TechPort

WASHINGTON, DC – NASA headquarters; December 8, 2015.

We want to congratulate our own Luis Cuellar of Agileana for his contribution to the NASA Group Achievement Award to the TechPort Development Team (consisting of employees and contractors from NASA, ARES Corporation, REI Systems, Tauri Group, inQbation dba Agileana) for innovative and outstanding development of TechPort, a web-based system that serves NASA’s integrated authoritative technology data source and decision-making tool.

Luis Cuellar NASA award

Before TechPort was developed, NASA documented information about NASA’s technology programs and projects in a variety of existing software systems that spanned the Centers and Mission Directorates. Using these legacy systems to achieve an integrated view of technology investment information across the agency was both a labor- and time-intensive process. The lack of a readily available integrated view of the technology investment portfolio limited NASA’s ability to rapidly assess the alignment and balance of the overall technology portfolio and conduct integrated decision making. Additionally, NASA did not have a mechanism to make information about NASA technology development activities easy to find, accessible, and usable by the public.

The TechPort Development Team worked tirelessly to develop system requirements, conduct trades studies, and multiple user tests to develop TechPort. In 2014, the team completed all development milestones, executed 2 major releases to enhance speed, data entry capabilities, system security, and create the public-facing site. During this period, the team also operated the internal system, maintaining a 99% availability and reliability, while enabling more than 3,600 NASA professionals to conducted searches and generate more than 8,200 technology reports. In December 2014, the TechPort Independent Review Board concluded that this small program had a well-structured development methodology, ample evidence to demonstrate successful achievement of the system requirements, and had completed an extensive test well beyond what is typical of a similarly-sized program. As a result, TechPort was approved for Public Release in January 2015.

TechPort will facilitate NASA’s achievement of goals related to the Open Data Executive Order and Open Data Policy (Office of Management and Budget Memorandum M-13-13) by providing research and development data that is open and machine-readable, and available to third parties. The portion of TechPort’s data made available to the public will support continued job growth, Government efficiency, and the social good that can be gained from opening Government data to the public.The more than 6000 historical projects and 1200 active projects documented in TechPort describe the promising new technologies that will help NASA achieve our extraordinary missions.

This integrated user-friendly system will enable NASA to conduct easier data mining, provide greater consistency in analytical studies, data validation from one source, and reduce multiple requests to program and project staff, thus saving time and money. The system will provide senior leaders with the ability to quickly and easily manage the technology portfolio in a new way, aligning mission directorate technology investments to minimize duplication, and lower cost while providing critical capabilities that support missions and longer-term national needs.

 


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