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NASA Watch note: this email was widely distributed at NASA JPL.
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2000 19:05:25 -0700
When enough people start to nag me about the absence of a newsletter, I
know it is time to write one. It's time!
BALANCED DIETS
Fad diets always seem to have one thing in common: an imbalanced diet!
They advocate too many carbos or too much protein or an overdose of
vitamins or too much of one food group or the exclusion of another. I
doubt that any of these diets would be healthy in the long run.
I took a management course at Stanford a few years ago which emphasized
time as the only important management metric. The philosophy was
"measure
time and all other metrics will take care of themselves." The
instructor
had written an entire book on the subject. In theory it sounded good.
In
practice it was something else. We had two people taking the course who
worked for a company that had the same instructor serving as a
consultant.
The company was following the consultant's advice. However, the two
employees told us privately that they were working incredible hours and
had
every stress-related illness you can think of. Their observation was
that
if you measure only time, you will inevitably work people to death.
(Perhaps literally!)
Balance is required in our personal as well as our professional lives.
Too
much of anything can be dangerous to our physical or mental health. The
same holds for an institution or company. Too much emphasis on any
single
facet of the business will inevitably bring down the entire
organization.
When Dan Goldin took the reins of NASA in the early '90s, he had
observed
that NASA was out of balance. In space science, for example, we were
focused on very large missions that could be afforded only once per
decade.
Mission requirements dominated the design process; cost was a dependent
variable, often growing with time. Goldin assessed that NASA's strategy
would bring down the Agency. Enter faster, better, cheaper.
FBC came with words like smaller and more frequent missions, more
technology, and taking greater risk; and a failure now and then is OK.
Even today, after all the investigations of mission failures, that
philosophy still has strong support. Unfortunately, what happened back
in
the early '90s, nearly simultaneously with the introduction of FBC, was
the
notion of cost-capped projects and tight cost control. Add that to the
"C"
in FBC, and you have an imbalance in the making. "Projects exceeding
their
costs by 15% will be terminated" was one of the many statements of the
day.
"Design to cost" was another. "If you can't do the job for this cost,
we'll find someone else who can." Almost overnight NASA was on a
fixed-price diet, with an appetite and design processes from the older,
large mission era. In a sense, cost had become the single management
metric. Mars '98 was the inevitable extreme of all this imbalance.
Many now worry that risk will become the single management metric du
jour.
It's the obvious reaction to a series of failures. However, risk
reduction
costs money. At what point do you draw the line? In the space
business,
no mission will ever be risk free, regardless of the amount of money
spent.
Thus, too much risk aversion and NASA is on another path to oblivion.
JPL and NASA are defining a new era of mission design philosophy.
Requirements (representing the potential scientific return of the
mission),
cost, and risk must be in balance in the new philosophy. No single
element
can dominate (or be ignored) to the exclusion of the others. That's an
easy statement to make, but, like eating a balanced diet, it's harder to
put into practice.
The JPL Executive Council has recently developed a set of principles to
assist this balancing act. If you study those principles carefully,
you'll
notice that each is focused on assuring the correct balance -- from the
earliest concept phase through the complete life cycle of the project --
from Headquarters/JPL deal making to the Work Agreements at the worker
level. This is not just the responsibility of upper management or
project
management -- it's everyone's responsibility. Will it be hard to
achieve
the balance? Will it require more negotiation? Do we have an
alternative?
Need I answer?
I feel very positive about the project side of JPL right now -- not
because
we've suddenly found the secret formula, but because we're putting in
the
right checks to assure the right balance. In the long run, that's the
right diet to live on.
The failures and investigations have put much of JPL under a dark cloud
of
uncertainty the last few months. Now that all the investigative reports
are out and signs exist that the appropriate corrective actions have
started, I, and I hope you, can come out from under that cloud with
renewed
enthusiasm and optimism. To add to that project optimism, just
yesterday
Art Murphy gave me some news on the technology front that brightened my
day
in spite of the rain. But I'll save that good news for another day and
another newsletter. For now, all this talk about diets has made me
hungry
-- it's dinnertime!
All the best,
Bill Weber
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