"It isn’t that we don’t trust you...but... we’ve decided to go over your head"

Concerned with engineering issues on the Apollo 1 spacecraft, astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee created this crew portrait for program manager Joseph Shea, captioned, “It isn’t that we don’t trust you, Joe, but this time we’ve decided to go over your head.”

Fifty years ago this past January, during a launch pad test of what was intended to be the first manned mission of the Apollo program, a cabin fire broke out. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee perished in that fire. NASA was never the same.

The accident review board did not pinpoint the exact cause of the fire, but what they found was worse: a series of design and construction flaws that made catastrophe all too likely. When the Apollo 1 capsule was shipped to Kennedy Space Center, there were 113 significant incomplete planned engineering changes. After delivery, NASA issued an astounding additional 623 engineering change orders!

Gus Grissom was reportedly so upset that he hung a lemon on the simulator. After expressing their concerns about the amount of flammable material in the cabin, the astronauts gave the program manager, Joseph Shea, a portrait of the three astronauts praying, with the caption above. (Shown in the photo above from left to right, Edward White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee.)

Of course, no project, no matter how well run, can be immune to all disasters. Any Bare Knuckled Project Manager (BKPM) is never so presumptuous as to think he or she can control all risk. While any particular accident can usually be avoided, it’s absurd to think they all can be. Most project accidents do not cost lives, but this series of mistakes did.

Grissom himself recognized the unavoidable risks in spaceflight. “You sort of have to put that out of your mind,” he said in a 1966 interview. “There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course; this can happen on any flight; it can happen on the last one as well as the first one. So, you just plan as best you can to take care of all these eventualities, and you get a well-trained crew and you go fly.”

The key words in Grissom’s statement are plan and well-trained. The BKPM knows that problems and mistakes are inevitable, and designs the process with that in mind.

Gene Kranz; making project management "Tough and Competent"

While there wasn’t anything NASA could do about Apollo 1, there was a lot they could do about future Apollo missions. In fact, one of the key reasons Apollo 13 returned safely to Earth has to do with the reaction to Apollo 1.

Mission director and unofficial BKPM Gene Kranz (pictured above) developed the “Kranz Dictum,” which guided the response. When the next failure inevitably happened, the team was prepared. Plans had been laid in, and everyone was well trained.

In the movie version of Apollo 13, Kranz (played by Ed Harris) frequently says, “Failure is not an option!” The quote is made up for the movie, but the sentiment is real. Here's the real story: 

Following the launchpad fire of Apollo 1, Gene Kranz spoke to his team the following Monday and delivered what became known as the “Kranz Dictum.”

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Here’s what Kranz said:

Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it.

We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, “Dammit, stop!”

I don't know what Thompson's committee [investigating the accident] will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.

From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: “Tough and Competent.” Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for.

Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.

When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write “Tough and Competent” on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.” (Wasser, 2005)

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Face the Future, Not the Past

The traditional project manager isn’t part of the three-sided table (see our prior posts); he or she is part of the project team. Accountable for the team process but not accountable for the project vision or objective, the traditional project manager does what he or she is told. Since vision issues are at the heart of most project failures, this yields a mixture of successful and unsuccessful outcomes — no matter how good the traditional project manager is!

When a BKPM enters the picture, the roles shift. The BKPM is accountable for the vision process. If a project is wrong or unrealistic, the BKPM confronts the issue before the project even gets started, using forced clarification as a process to bring the project in line with reality. Either the vision (performance criteria/scope) changes, the circumstances (resources/time) change, or the project needs to be rethought — sometimes even cancelled.

The BKPM doesn’t create the vision, but is still responsible for the process that establishes it. The BKPM pushes back against both customer and team, and oversees course corrections as the project unfolds.

Visions are necessarily rooted in reality. You can’t just imagine some castle in the sky and call it a project vision — though sadly, it happens all the time. A real vision starts with a clear understanding of the current situation and a realistic appraisal of the available resources and constraints that shape its accomplishment. The outcome of the project can be a stretch goal, but it can’t be detached from the art of the possible.

When a project is in trouble, it’s necessary to revisit the vision. If reality — constraints, needs, resources, and issues — has shifted, the objective may shift as well. Moving the goal posts is sometimes legitimate — and sometimes necessary. Sometimes the goal posts move on their own, whether you want them to or not.

Sometimes, a project needs to be terminated before it spirals out of control. Other times, we learn that the customer needs have evolved, and the project as originally specified no long solves the underlying problem. Things have to change. Although nobody enjoys hearing bad news, the BKPM has to step up to the plate early.

A change in vision isn’t the same thing as a failure of the project. Apollo 1 was an unambiguous failure, but Apollo 13 was not. Apollo 13’s original objective was to go to the Moon, but when one of the oxygen tanks exploded, the vision and mission changed. The old goal was no longer operative, and a new goal — get the astronauts home safely — took center stage.

First published in Bare Knuckled Project Management; how to succeed at every project (Gruebl, Welch & Dobson, Gameplan Press, 2013), available for download - Smashwords or Amazon. Feel free to call Jeff Welch or me at Think at 443.313.3348 to learn more about how to use BKPM to succeed in every project.