Managing Risk
What can Artemis-1 launch teach us?
Context
The biggest rocket ever created by humanity finally rose up towards the heavens. This mega rocket chugged through 2 million pounds of solid & 735,000 gallons of liquid propellant within 8 minutes. All to launch a tiny spacecraft called Orion, sitting atop this behemoth, towards the Moon.
But this massive success is built on dealing with decisions made outside of NASA’s control and inherent risk in launching something into space.
The group with money a.k.a the Congress wanted this project to create as many jobs as possible. Lobbying made sure that the existing aerospace contractors got the biggest piece of this pie. With its hands tied back with budget restrictions and limited contractor options, NASA couldn’t go and develop all the engines from scratch. They had to repackage (reheat) the leftovers. Most of it came from the retired shuttle era.
Even after multiple delays and being tremendously over budget, Artemis did get off the ground. Most people didn’t realize the monumental effort and discipline behind the scenes it took to make it possible.
Looking In
I was curious about what makes this agency handle such constraints. From the outside, NASA’s strategy looks like this —
Guesstimate, but have buffers & back ups built into the plan
Give updates on each milestone — construction, rollout, dress rehearsal and finally launch
Tie business value back to the stakeholders — ‘what science will Artemis do’ and ‘which states were involved in the development’ (no points for guessing, it was all of 50 states)
When things don’t go as planned — Over communicate and leaders accept responsibility & publicly defend the ‘team’
Project Management
Looking further into NASA’s risk mitigation strategies, I found its own Governance & Strategic handbook insightful —
NASA (and its predecessor NACA) has a storied history that is the envy of the technological world. We have repeatedly accomplished great things, sometimes making the incredibly difficult look almost routine. We have also on occasion fallen short, yet our policies and processes — beginning with this policy directive — assure that lessons are not just learned but fully embraced.
Reading further into that handbook, I basically saw how NASA approached Program & Project Management. This is a loose list of things I found —
Separation of Authority
Decision Authority is clearly understood, i.e stakeholders can participate, but not everyone makes the decision.
Programmatic Authority covers strategic investments required for reaching NASA’s goals. A project represents a specific investment in that Programmatic plan.
Institutional Authority is everything else required for implementation of the project (people & infrastructure).
Technical Authority provides independent oversight of projects to confirm they meet the technical benchmark.
Risk setup
One cannot be completely risk free, you need to know what is a “sufficiently safe” limit.
Team, program, and project leads (Programmatic authority), along with concurrence from Technical authority, ascertain the minimum risk.
This risk is tailored to the specific mission parameters and its phase. A robotic mission carries less risk than a human mission. An early innovation project will be encouraged to take more risk. Whereas matured technology should have less risk.
Project Specific
Requirements’ tailoring process is used to avoid seeking one-off project specific waivers. It’s inclusive of key stakeholders and programmatic and institutional authorities.
Key Decision Points (KDPs) are identified in advance to decide when to move to the next project phase.
Near real-time monitoring, evaluating and reporting during project execution is critical for oversight.
Formal dissent process — rank has no meaning here.
Yet!
Even with all that, Artemis had several launch delays. There was a leak during the original launch attempt. That launch was scrubbed. Faulty sensors caused more confusion. Then a hurricane flew by and the vehicle had to be parked back into the garage. Finally we got it out on Nov 16th, and waited with bated breaths for countdown to hit 0.
That also wasn’t smooth. There was another leak detected. NASA had to dispatch a red team (they did NOT wear anything red) to fix the leak. They got the job done and Artemis finally took flight.
Lessons for us
Putting all this into context. We deal with risk in every aspect of our lives. Perhaps, the most at work. So we all can take some inspiration from a public agency that’s in the business of launching something into space, while dealing with several constraints and the possibility of a very public humiliation.
By learning from its past, building consistent processes and having faith in its people, NASA gets to light up the biggest rocket ever. As the science guy put it — with this launch, NASA gets its mojo back!
