As director of the Missions and Programs Assessment Division (MPAD) in the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA), Johnny Nguyen leads Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) activities in support of NASA's diverse portfolio, including spacecraft, science payloads, launch vehicles, technology development and aeronautics.

In this role since 2022, Nguyen and the MPAD team serve as OSMA’s primary interface with NASA’s mission directorates and center SMA organizations.

“It's been very interesting to see the wide breadth and scope of all the missions and programs at the agency level, especially in the Science Mission Directorate, Space Technology Mission Directorate and the Aeronautics and Research Mission Directorate,” said Nguyen.

“In my role, I get to see how each organization has its own culture and unique perspective on SMA, allowing MPAD to be able to identify cross-cutting issues and trends.”

The MPAD team helps identify lessons learned that can be applied throughout the agency. Nguyen’s leadership led to the development of an OSMA Cross-Cutting Issues database that enables other areas throughout the agency to learn from the collected data. The goal is to continue to strengthen the database and make it more efficient.

Throughout his nearly 30-year career at NASA, Nguyen has supported several different areas of the agency, taking on roles of increasing responsibility and strengthening his leadership skills along the way.

“I always aspired to be a senior leader, hoping to make a greater and greater impact on this agency that I love,” Nguyen said. “I sought out opportunities to develop core leadership skills, including business management, strategic planning, institutional and programmatic experience and technology readiness skills.”

Some of Nguyen’s previous leadership roles included serving as the associate manager for Integration and Analysis in Gateway Deep Space Logistics. In this role, he provided project management leadership for the logistics missions for Gateway in the areas of budget, resources, workforce, governance, contract management, configuration management, Risk Management and life cycle schedule.

He also served as office chief in the Kennedy SMA Directorate where he provided leadership and direction for special projects and helped to establish safe, efficient requirements, policies, practices and processes.

While holding leadership positions across the agency, Nguyen has had multiple opportunities for mentorship. Mentoring has been a key component of Nguyen’s career since he joined NASA in 1998.

“Being in a position of both receiving mentoring advice from others and mentoring others has been a great way to continually learn and continuously give back to others,” he said.

Nguyen also values mentorship as a way to stay informed and network with other senior leaders.  

“Mentoring helps you gain a lot of situational awareness as far as hearing what’s going on from the ‘ground floor’,” he said. “It’s also great to learn from other senior managers about what they're working through and hear their problem-solving approach.”

In order to be relevant, successful and viable for the future, Nguyen believes the SMA community needs to emphasize additional types of skill sets for personnel, especially self-awareness.

“I’ve spent a lot of time fine-tuning my gut, calibrating myself and questioning myself over the years to get to a point where I have the confidence to trust my instincts and dive in,” Nguyen said. “It takes a little practice but you can do this by asking others for input and providing honest feedback, like the 360-degree self-awareness technique.”

He also said focusing on data management is key to SMA’s future.

“It’s about being proficient in managing our data,” he said. “We need to maximize the way we manage massive amounts of data in a very efficient and trustworthy way.”

These collections of data are essential for the SMA community to increase awareness about acquisitions and procurements as NASA looks to the future.

“Looking at where the agency has been trending and where we're predicted to go, it is increasingly important to rely on commercial companies and services and leverage contracts to include appropriate levels of SMA,” he said.  

Nguyen encourages the mission directorates to consider SMA as part of their team that will help them accomplish their goals.

“All too often, I think people look at safety as burdensome, like a roadblock or a challenge to get through,” Nguyen said. “While some of the healthy tension is there on purpose, at the end of the day, we are just another part of the team helping to move things along, and that’s an important mindset for everyone to have.”