The crash of NASA's culture
In July 2004, I put online a small paper titled "The ideological failure of
the Space Agencies" http://www.tdf.it/2004/age_eng.htm
In that work I compared the gigantic NASA's project management system with
the lean and targeted_to_the_goal one of Scaled Composites.
For mounths I asked to myself if I was too hard, speaking about 'ideological
failure'.
But now, well inside the year zero A.S. (After SpaceShipOne) a series of
articles seem to state that I was right.
NASA seems to be in the middle of a devastating ideological crisis. Does
someone understand whether some new strategic lines are emerging?
Nowadays someone could be attempted to react with an overdose of procedures,
rules, and bureaucracy.
In other environments, someone started to think that a concept of 'maturity'
of the project design processes is better than the old concepts of
'quality', 'total quality', 'excellence', etc...
X33 could be called in some way an 'excellent' project, full of futurist
technologies, but it never could really fly...
The concept of Maturity includes human experience, and capability to assess,
case by case, what is really needed, in terms of requirements tracing,
testing, etc... to reach the specific goal.
Something very different from the maniac focus on documents details of the
'80s and '90s quality standards. A focus on processes, more than on
procedures. And a capability to assess case by case everything: skills,
technologies, methodologies, machines, procedures, taking what is really
relevant, in the measure it can be useful, discarding what is a useless
burden.
The success of SpaceShipOne was also the success of skilled and experienced
people, of the human intelligence vs. machines, automated procedures,
gigantic quality systems and bureaucracy. We were maybe not yet able to pull
all the lessons, embedded in the success of Burt Rutan and his friends.
Maybe the NASA's big chiefs should be humble enough to invite Burt to teach,
provided that he has time and thinks it's a worth work.
Aim high!
Adriano Autino
____________________________________________________________________________
Read on USA today:
From bad to worse? NASA in culture conflict since Columbia
HOUSTON (AP) - In the years leading up to the Columbia tragedy, the habit of
NASA managers was to hammer employees into agreement at meetings or get them
so exasperated they walked out, creating a last-stand consensus.
It was just as brutal during Columbia's doomed flight: Managers dismissed
engineers' concerns about the now infamous piece of foam insulation that
flew off and knocked a hole in the shuttle's wing; they downplayed the
problem at meetings and, from beginning to grisly end, insisted nothing
could be done.
What about after Columbia? Has NASA's safety culture changed since the
spacecraft and seven astronauts crashed over Texas?
The whole article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-04-23-NASA-culure-clash_x.htm
--
Space Future | To unsubscribe send email with the subject "unsubscribe"
www.spacefuture.com | to "sf-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx".