Interview of Andrea Cotellessa, Head of the Galileo Space Segment Management Office at the European Space Agency

Could you introduce yourself and your activity at the European Space Agency?

I’m the head of the Galileo Space Segment Management Office in the Directorate of Navigation and my unit is responsible for the design, development, procurement of the Galileo satellite, the European GNSS constellation, the procurement of the atomic clocks that are the heart of our satellites and our whole system and the launch services, to launch the satellite.

What were the challenges CYLAD helped you adress?

With CYLAD we started working almost five years ago at the time of the preparation of the MFF, the one that is currently in place. We performed a number of activities. Make and buy analysis that was very important to try and identify which competences we considered strategic to our tasks, and which one were more of a commodity type that we could provision from the metrics of the European Space Agency. We did an excellent exercise to establish a workload model, a prediction of the level of resources that were required by my organizational units to perform the allocated tasks over time,to anticipate pics workload and to try and be more efficient in deploying our competences and resources where they were most needed.

What value and benefits did CYLAD bring to your teams?

We made a strong move in what I consider a more state-of-the-art way of managing our resources based on more measurable and quantifiable data. We started working on a predictive workload model that was very important for us to be ready. So overall the benefit was in more structure in the way we were working and to achieve a higher degree of efficiency.

How would you describe your collaboration with CYLAD in three words?

Competent, customer oriented, very flexible and reactive. I found it a very pleasant, very fruitful cooperation, lots of motivation, good quality of work.