“If people lose perspective… everything falls apart”: project management in the space industry

The UK space sector is taking off. For the autumn 2024 issue of Project journal, I visited Nammo Space in Buckinghamshire, which makes rocket propulsion systems for satellites and missions to the moon and other planets.

With this month’s focus on the APM Women in Project Management Conference, I asked Lucy Stock, until recently a Senior Project Manager at Nammo and now a project management consultant, about her experience of working in a sector that is known for being male dominated.

“When I was growing up, I obviously wanted to be an astronaut, as everybody did,” she says. “I studied physics and I just loved everything about it.” Studying at Birmingham University, she estimates that only around 5–10% of students on her course were female.

Stock went on to work with laser interferometers, then particle accelerators, “just because I like the idea of big impactful physics”, she explains, before an opportunity came up to work in project management for a space company.

“Space was the area that really got me excited about physics when I was younger, so I thought I’d give it a go. And I’ve just loved it. It’s so exciting.”

Looking at the big picture

What is Stock’s advice on being a good project manager within the space industry?

“The good thing about space projects is that they have fully multi-disciplinary teams. You’ve got mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, quality people, product assurance people and senior technicians.

“Everyone is working on different things within the project, but there’s always a goal, whether that’s a short-term goal to finish something within the next couple of weeks or a longer-term goal. [You need] to give the team the perspective of the schedule, because quite often you don’t get them involved in the bigger picture.

“But I think it's really important to do that at the beginning and then at regular stages of the project – to remind people what the key milestones and key deliverables are, and ultimately what this thing is going to end up doing.

“If people lose perspective on any of those things, everything falls apart.”

Striking a balance

What does she enjoy about her work? “It's so varied. That, for me, is key – and being able to use my technical background with my physics as well, every day.” She stresses the importance of project managers engaging with the project to the right level of detail.

“You get different styles of project manager, some who are super technical and some who probably aren't technical enough. But for me, I think there’s a happy balance in the middle, because you have to be slightly divorced from those technical decisions otherwise you forget the bigger picture of the project,” she says.

While Stock is happy to use her technical and academic background in her work, she says she was drawn to project management due to the variety and the opportunity to work with teams that comprise people in different areas across all aspects of the space industry.

Future prospects

With so much at stake on space projects (after all, you can’t fix anything in space once it has left Earth), there is significant pressure to succeed in highly uncertain environments.

“If it does all get to be too much, you can just sit there for five minutes and say, ‘OK, I'm going to be sending a rocket to Venus’,” says Stock. You don’t get much ‘bigger picture’ than that.

With the space industry in the UK growing fast, what does Stock think about its future prospects?

“Things like the National Space Propulsion Test Facility, where we can do rapid testing on our doorstep, will revolutionise particular areas of the business. It certainly seems to be in a growth period – it has exciting prospects. You’re getting more and more people involved, more and more women coming through as well, which I think is really nice,” she says.

Adjusting to the impact of ‘New Space’ companies, like Space X, which are disrupting traditional project management methods in favour of rapid development and testing, brings its own challenges. Bringing together the worlds of ‘old’ and ‘new’ space to take the best from both worlds, and so create a balanced middle ground, is where Stock hopes the future lies.

In the meantime, the moonshot projects continue to blast off and further explore the realms of space…

Don’t forget to read the autumn 2024 issue of Project journal, and to listen to APM Podcast for a deep dive into project management at Nammo Space.