Jet Propulsion Laboratory PDF

9-110-031 REV: MAY 27, 2010 ROBERT S. KAPLAN ANETTE MIKES Jet Propullsion Laborat...

9-110-031 REV: MAY 27, 2010 ROBERT S. KAPLAN ANETTE MIKES Jet Propullsion Laborat L ory The only thing worse thaan a delay is a mission that faails. — Gentrry Lee Geentry Lee, sennior systems engineer at thet Jet Propulsion Laborattory, contemp plated the diffficult decisiion faced by the risk rev view board seven s weeks before the scheduled s launch of the Mars Biologgical Explorerr mission. Aftter a development period of more than four years an nd the expendditure of $6000 million doollars, howev ver, significan nt mission-thrreatening risk ks still remaiined. If the board b decided the remaiining risks weere too high, the next lau unch opportun nity would beb 26 months later, whenn the planets again a re-align ned. Lee pond dered whetherr to recommend launch or delay. Histtory and Mission M Thhe Jet Propullsion Laboratory (JPL) wasw a researcch and devellopment centter, managed d and operaated by Califoornia Institutte of Technology (CalTecch) under a contract c m NASA (National from Aeron nautics and Space S Admin pproximately 5,000 nistration), thee U.S. space agency. JPL employed ap full-tiime CalTech employees e an nd managed several s thousaand contracto ors. A group of CalTech gradu uate studentss and their adviser, Proffessor Theod dore von Karrman, found ded JPL duriing World War W II to dev velop and teest rockets an nd guided missiles m undeer the sponssorship of thee U.S. Army. During the 1950s, 1 JPL carrried out threee successful sub-orbital flights f and ono February 1, 1 1958, it helped launch Explorer E 1, America’s firstt satellite, wh hich sent back k data that leed to the disccovery of thee Van Allen radiation beltss high above the Earth’s surface. s In Occtober 1958, the U.S. con nsolidated itss various space program ms into a new w agency, NA ASA. JPL, sh hortly thereaafter, became NASA’s prim mary planetarry spacecraft center. JPL enngineers desig gned and opeerated the Ranger R and Su urveyor robo otic spacecrafft missions to o the Moon that prepared d the way fo or the mann ned Apollo lan ndings. JPL laaunched succcessful interp planetary explloration missiions, includinng the Marin ner spacecraftt to Venus, Mars, M and Meercury, the Gaalileo mission n to Jupiter and a its moonss, and the Voyager V missiions to Jupiteer, Saturn, Urranus, and Neptune. N JPL also develop ped the camerra for NASA A’s Hubble Sp pace Telescoppe and operated the Deep Space Netwo ork for comm munication wiith all of its inter-planetarry robotic misssions. NA ASA, howeveer, had also experienced e seeveral tragic failures. In Jaanuary 1967, months beforre the sched duled launch of Apollo 1, th hree astronauuts died when n a fire eruptted in a ground-test capsuule. In Januaary 1986, the seven crew members, m inccluding schoo ol teacher Chrrista McAulifffe, died wheen the Spacee Shuttle Challlenger broke apart a 73 seco onds after launch. JPL wass not involved d in either of those missioons but had its i most visiblle failure wheen the Mars Observer, O laun nched in 19922, lost contactt with grounnd controllerss in 1993. Soome described d this $1 billiion project ass “a huge am mount of taxpaayers’ Professoors Robert S. Kapla an and Anette Mikees prepared this caase with the assistaance of Gentry Lee and Chris Lewickii. The mission desccribed in this casee is fictional and based on the generaal experiences of Lee L and Lewicki. HBS H cases are develloped solely as thee basis for class disscussion. Cases arre not intended to serve s as endorsemeents, sources of prim mary data, or illusttrations of effectivee or ineffective man nagement. Copyrigght © 2010 Presiden nt and Fellows of Harvard H College. To T order copies or request permissionn to reproduce matterials, call 1-800-545-7685, write Haarvard Business Scchool Publishing, Bo oston, MA 02163, or o go to www.hbsp p.harvard.edu/educators. This publicaation may not be digitized, photocoopied, or otherwise reproduced, posteed, or transmitted, without w the permisssion of Harvard Bu usiness School. This document is authorized for use only in Prof. M P Ram Mohan & Prof. Viswanath Pingali's Senior Management Programme (SMP-BL13) 2024 at Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad from Apr 2024 to Oct 2024.  110-031 Jet Propulsion Laboratory money spent for nothing.” In the early 1990s, the political and public mood demanded reforms to the space program, which led to the appointment (in 1992) of Daniel Goldin as the new NASA administrator. Goldin, formerly an executive at aerospace contractor TRW, believed that new management techniques and technologies, along with accepting more risk, would dramatically reduce the cost of NASA’s missions. In a 1992 speech, he challenged JPL to adopt “faster, better, cheaper” techniques so that it could do more without spending more money. He asserted: Be bold—take risks. [A] project that’s 20 for 20 isn’t successful. It’s proof that we’re playing it too safe. If the gain is great, risk is warranted. Failure is OK, as long as it’s on a project that’s pushing the frontiers of technology.1 But the new strategy did not reverse the incidence of major failures. The Mars Climate Orbiter disappeared during orbit insertion on Sept. 23, 1999, due to a navigation error; analyses had been performed and communicated using English units (feet and pounds) rather than NASA-mandated metric units (meters and kilograms). The Mars Polar Lander disappeared as it neared the surface of Mars in December 1999. To save money, the Lander did not have telemetry during its descent to Mars, and subsequent analysis suggested that the failure was probably due to a software fault that shut off the descent rocket too early, causing the spacecraft to fall the last 40 meters onto the surface. These two failures ended the “faster, better, cheaper” management philosophy for Mars Landers. NASA’s manned space program experienced another tragic failure with the loss, on February 1, 2003, of Space Shuttle Columbia and its seven crew members 16 minutes before scheduled touchdown. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that the accident was not an anomalous random event, but rather... rooted in NASA’s Space Shuttle history and culture, including the original compromises that were required to gain approval for the Shuttle, subsequent years of resource constraints, fluctuating priorities, schedule pressures... and lack of an agreed national vision for human space flight. Cultural traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety [included] reliance on past success as a substitute for sound engineering practices; organizational barriers that prevented effective communication of critical safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion; lack of integrated management across program elements; and the evolution of an informal chain of command and decision-making processes that operated outside the organization’s rules.2 Implementing a New Risk Management Culture at JPL In 2000, NASA’s new Mars Program Director, Scott Hubbard, asked Gentry Lee, a former JPL employee, to return and help develop an architecture for a new Mars Mission Program. Hubbard wanted the architecture to include a risk management program that would significantly increase JPL’s mission success rate. Lee, a graduate of the University of Texas and MIT, had worked with JPL from 1969 to 1976 as part of the Viking project team that engineered the first successful landing of a spacecraft on Mars. Lee subsequently became chief engineer of the Galileo project, which over its 10- year mission, explored Jupiter with both an atmospheric probe and an orbiter that mapped the planet’s major satellites. Galileo was the last of the grand-scale missions before NASA’s “faster, better, cheaper” era. Lee left JPL during this era to pursue various other activities including co- 1 Daniel Goldin, transcript of remarks and discussion at the 108th Space Studies board meeting, Irvine, Calif., November 18, 1992; Daniel Goldin, “Toward the Next Millennium: A Vision for Spaceship Earth,” speech delivered at the World Space Congress, September 2, 1992. 2 Executive Summary, Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report Volume 1: 9 (August 2003). 2 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. M P Ram Mohan & Prof. Viswanath Pingali's Senior Management Programme (SMP-BL13) 2024 at Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad from Apr 2024 to Oct 2024.  Jet Propulsion Laboratory 110-031 authoring four novels with science fiction grandmaster Arthur C. Clarke, collaborating with Carl Sagan on an award-winning science documentary series for television, designing computer games, writing columns, and lecturing on space exploration and extra-terrestrial life. Lee accepted Hubbard’s offer and in 2002 became JPL’s chief systems engineer, with responsibility for the engineering integrity of all JPL planetary missions. Lee defined his role as “minister without portfolio, the person who made sure everything worked the way it was supposed to on a global scale.” He described how he thought about mission risks: At the start of a project, try to write down everything you can that is risky. Then put together a plan for each of those risks, and watch how the plan evolves. Some risks are “business as usual risks.” We are familiar with these risks and know how to quantify and mitigate them. Others are “development risks,” in which the project’s engineering enters territory we have never experienced before. And, finally, we have risks imposed by the environment that we can’t control, which we call the “unknown unknowns.” We attempt to quantify all the risks of each type and aggregate them into an approximate likelihood of mission success. The final question we face is, “do we launch or not?” How large does failure have to loom before you decide to cancel or delay a project in which the project people have worked for years and taxpayers have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the hope of producing important new scientific knowledge? Lee believed that “risk mitigation was painful; not a natural event for humans to perform,” and that overcoming cultural resistance would be his largest challenge. He explained: JPL engineers graduate from top schools at the top of their class. They are used to being right in their design and engineering decisions. I have to get them comfortable thinking about all the things that can go wrong. This requires accepting a culture of intellectual confrontation. Peoples’ ambitions and careers get wrapped up in being right all the time. They have to learn that it’s not important whether your initial idea is right. It’s important whether or not the idea we go forward with is right. And that’s what intellectual confrontation helps us achieve. JPL already had an existing risk assurance process but project engineers typically viewed it as peripheral to their work, something they had to do just before milestone reviews. Lee wanted risk management to become embedded within the engineering process so that it would be continually front-of-mind during a project’s life. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File: Janus-Vatican.JPG, accessed February 2010. Reprinted with permission under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Referring to Janus, the two-faced Roman god of gates and doors who looked forward and backward, Lee remarked, “Innovation, looking forward, is absolutely essential, but innovation needs to be balanced with reflecting backwards, learning from experience about what can go wrong.” 3 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. M P Ram Mohan & Prof. Viswanath Pingali's Senior Management Programme (SMP-BL13) 2024 at Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad from Apr 2024 to Oct 2024.  110-031 Jet Propulsion Laboratory Over the next six years, Lee helped introduce a comprehensive system for managing the risks of planetary missions. While early elements of the system had been used in JPL-managed projects during this time, the Mars Biological Explorer (MBE) program was the first that used the system from initial project formulation all the way through launch.3 Recent missions to Mars had confirmed the presence of iced water in the North Polar Region and the widespread existence of salts and minerals elsewhere that could have been formed with water. NASA scientists now believed that the water could have supported life. The $745 million MBE mission would send a non-mobile platform to Mars to acquire and analyze subsurface samples for bio-markers that would indicate the presence of recent or active life-processes under the surface of Mars. MBE, like any planetary landing program, consisted of four principal stages: launch, cruise, entry- descent-landing, and surface operations. Each stage had its own challenges and project team. An engineer on the cruise stage remarked that guiding a spacecraft from Earth to a specific location on Mars was comparable to shooting a baseball from the pitching mound of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles to cross the outside corner of the plate in Wrigley Field in Chicago. But, she pointed out, the spacecraft cruise was harder because Earth and Mars were both moving relative to each other in their own orbits around the sun while simultaneously spinning on their axes. Lee felt, however, that the laws of planetary motion made the cruise-stage risks “known unknowns,” whereas landing the spacecraft safely on Mars during the entry-descent-landing (EDL) stage faced “unknown unknowns.” The spacecraft would arrive at the atmosphere of Mars traveling at 12,000 miles per hour, 20 times faster than a speeding bullet, and, within a few minutes, had to decelerate and land safely on a surface of unpredictable composition and slope (see Exhibit 1). The engineers in the Pasadena control room described the EDL stage, during which they could not communicate with the spacecraft, as their “six minutes of terror.” Risk Review Board The MBE project had a 12-person risk review board, chaired by Lee, consisting of experienced and respected technical experts from JPL, NASA management, and the project’s prime contractor. The members of the board were independent of the project and had been chosen based on their ability to bring knowledge and expertise to it. The experts served on the risk review board because they could make an important contribution to mission success, even without being directly involved in the project. The review board created the culture of intellectual confrontation during three critical review meetings during the project. At each of the three-day meetings, the board played devil’s advocate, questioning and challenging project engineers about their assumptions for how the mission would work. Lee described the role of the risk review board: Often project people have bet their careers on a mission, and have become comfortable making assumptions about the parameters they need to design for. The risk review board is an independent group who are empowered to ask about the bad things that can happen to good designs. What if the parameter changed from 12 to 16? We don’t want just technical expertise on a risk review board. We need a certain type of personality, people with a lot of self- confidence who are willing to speak out and challenge. We want them to be paranoid, constantly worrying about what can go wrong. 3 The Mars Biological Explorer is a fictional composite of several Mars landing missions. The issues described for the MBE project are based on situations that occurred during actual Mars landing projects. 4 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. M P Ram Mohan & Prof. Viswanath Pingali's Senior Management Programme (SMP-BL13) 2024 at Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad from Apr 2024 to Oct 2024.  Jet Propulsion Laboratory 110-031 Risk review meetings were highly interactive, challenging, and intense. Systems engineer Chris Lewicki, an MBE review board member, described the culture at the meetings: We tear each other apart in a review, throwing stones and giving very critical commentary about everything that’s going on. The risk review process gives the project engineers an opportunity to see their work from another perspective. It lifts their noses away from the grindstone. For the past year, they have been focused on how some component worked and became personally invested in it. Now they find out it’s either much more important than they had perceived or, occasionally, insignificant in the context of everything else going on. It’s rarely exactly what they thought it was. Lee concurred: “Engineers have a forest and a tree problem. They may spend 75% of their time worrying about things like polishing a cannonball, which have little impact on mission success. Only 25% of their time is spent on risks that could cause mission failure.” Preliminary Mission and Systems Review The MBE review board’s first meeting, the Preliminary Mission and Systems Review (PMSR), occurred 51 months before the targeted launch date. The project team that attended the PMSR included the Project Manager, Mission Assurance Manager, Project Scientist, Mission Manager, and Project Systems Engineer. First they described the mission to the risk review board, and then the science necessary to accomplish it, the instrumentation necessary to perform the science, and the operations plan to make sure it would all happen. They highlighted six critical risks during the EDL phase of the mission that had to be addressed. The risks had been categorized as either “implementation risks,” which posed a challenge to completing the project in time for the launch of the spacecraft, or mission risks, which could arise during the mission itself. The MBE project team had identified the critical risks through a project risk assessment process that classified each possible mission or implementation risk along two dimensions: the consequences if the risk occurred, and the likelihood of a risk occurrence. The team used the scales shown below to classify the risks: Mission Consequence of Occurrence Score Consequence Definition 5 Very High Mission failure 4 High Significant (75%) degradation in mission benefits 3 Moderate Moderate (50%) degradation in mission benefits 2 Low Small (25%) degradation in mission benefits 1 Very Low Minimal (or no) degradation in mission benefits Implementation Consequence of Occurrence Score Consequence Definition 5 Very High Overran budget or contingency; unable to launch with current resources 4 High Consumed all budget, schedule or margin 3 Moderate Significant reduction in margin or launch date slack 2 Low Small reduction in margin or launch date slack 1 Very Low Minimal reduction in margin or launch date slack 5 This document is authorized for use only in Prof. M P Ram Mohan & Prof. Viswanath Pingali's Senior Management Programme (SMP-BL13) 2024 at Indian Institute of Management - Ahmedabad from Apr 2024 to Oct 2024.  110-031 Jet Propulsion Laboratory The team assessed the risk’s likelihood of occurrence based on experience, an estimate inferred from a statistical sample, or (lacking either of these) an educated guess. Likelihood of Occurrence Score Consequence Definition 5 Very High Almost certain (>70%) 4 High More likely than not (>50%) 3 Moderate Significant (>30%) 2 Low Unlikely (>5%) 1 Very Low Very unlikely (