Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

Attended the PMI Washington D.C. Chapter's monthly meeting last night at the Tyson's Corner Sheraton. It had been a while since I attended one (read the posts about the April and March meetings). Once again a number of project and technical managers from AOL were attending (thanks David for organizing the Open Services table). The logistics were changed a little bit yesterday since the bigger hall at the Sheraton where we are usually in is undergoing renovation so we were in the smaller room with lecture style format/seating rather than tables. Instead of dinner we had a buffet of heavy hors d'oeuvres including, appropriately for Thanksgiving week, a turkey station.

The speaker was Dr. Harold Kerzner one of the leading authorities on Project Management and the author of 16 textbooks including the classic Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling and Controlling, now in its 9th edition. The topic of his talk last night was "The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster: A Case Study in Risk Management". The causes of the accident have been documented in detail but what Dr. Kerzner did was to distill the some of the root causes and link them to a risk managment failure (and actually at the end of the day, an overall management failure). He worked at Morton Thiokol -- the company that made the solid booster rockets for the shuttle and was familiar with some of the intimate details of the project especially concerning the O-Rings in the booster rockets. The engineering and launch managers were aware of the risks associated with the secondary O-Ring possibly failing if the launch temperature was below 31 degrees Celcius. But due to an outlier datapoint the management dismissed the corellation between temperature and O-Ring failure! What's more -- the O-Ring failure risk was classified as a Criticality-1 risk (i.e. possible loss of life and/or vehicle) and needed to be communicated and signed off by senior NASA managemet. Adding to the pressue of launch was the fact that President Reagen wanted to talk to one of the teacher-astronauts during his State of the Union address hence the urgency to launch during thhe Jan 28, 1986 window. The C-1 Risk was downgraded to C-1R (i.e. redundancy available in systems -- a false notion stemming from the fact that there are two O-Rings), and was never brought before senior management. The launch took place in lowest ever ambient temperature of  36 degrees Fahrenheit! The O-Rings failed and the shuttle was lost.

What was even more alarming was his claim that more than half of the recommendations that the Rogers commission came up with were the same as the recommendations presented after the Columbia crash! However according to Dr. Kerzner now NASA is doing a much better job of communications and risk management and the astronauts themselves get to vote on the go/no-go for the launch, which was not the case in 1986. 

Tags: PMI, Project Management, Management, Leadership, Risk Management, Harold Kerzner

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