SCMI - Project Management
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Project Definition
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Houston we have a problem. On December 3rd 1999 the Mars Polar Lander approached the outer layers of the Martian atmosphere. Its mission was to release two Deep Space 2 microprobes that would penetrate the plant’s surface, analyze its soil and broadcast the results back to NASA. On entering the atmosphere the vehicle broke off contact. This was entirely as planned. It was then supposed to resume contact after landing. It never did. No one knows why. The best guess is that problems with its braking rockets caused it to crash disastrously into the surface of the planet. More embarrassing, this was the second Mars disaster. Only a few weeks earlier the Mars Climate Orbiter has probably burnt up in the Martian atmosphere. Both failures were later blamed on NASA’s policy which it called Faster, Better, Cheaper (FBC). Later this approach would be rechristened by critics, Faster, Cheaper ……. Splat! FBC was a deliberate attempt to overcome what had always been seen in space exploration as a trade-off relationship. An old engineering proverb has put it succinctly, ‘Faster, better, cheaper – choose two of the above’. FBC challenged this and wanted all three. Critics of the FBC philosophy claimed that cutting budgets (cheaper) and going for ambitious project delivery dates (faster) had resulted in worse rather than better solutions. Certainly the panel set up to investigate the Mars program failures concluded that the Mars projects were under funded by as much as 30 per cent. Cost cutting had gone too far, especially in terms of getting rid of its more experienced engineers, who being older and experienced, were expensive. In the previous five years more than 4,500 scientists and engineers had left NASA, of who only 1,000 were younger than forty. The panel also pointed out that the Mars projects had been very tight on time. There is a relatively small launch window for missions to Mars which occurs only once every twenty-six months. The panel concluded that, with its budget cut and its launch date fixed, the only way for managers to operate when things start going wrong was to run an unacceptable degree of risk. Later NASA admitted that it had probably ‘pushed the FBC philosophy too hard’, and that it was ‘time to re-think the approach’. Arguments still rage as to whether there is an absolute trade-off between speed, cost and quality in NASA projects, or whether the FBC philosophy is essentially the right approach that was just pushed too far.