HBR Guide to Project Management (Harvard Business Review Guides) by Harvard Business Review

Author:Harvard Business Review [Review, Harvard Business]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2013-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

Support from on High

“We’ve got video!” someone shouted, and there on the screens were multiple images of a man in a space suit dangling at the end of a loading crane.

It was well past midnight, but the reporters were still at CAA headquarters. They gathered around the screens. MacDonagle and Van Sant had long since given up trying to avoid them and were mingling with them as the repair attempt unfolded high above West Africa.

Everyone watched in silence as the crane, jury-rigged for the purpose, carried a spacewalker toward the space station’s torn solar array. REACH couldn’t even be seen— it was docked somewhere else.

“Harris Webb,” MacDonagle said ruefully as he watched the figure in the shiny suit. “It’s so fitting.” Years ago, MacDonagle and Webb had been pilots on the same shuttle mission, and Webb, though much younger, had been chosen to lead it. A U.S. physician, mountaineer, author, pilot, and gourmet cook, as well as an astronaut, he was the ultimate go-to guy, brilliant and fearless—almost to the point of being foolhardy.

The reporters were excitedly discussing his stunt. Because REACH had failed, Webb was going out on the end of the crane to repair the array by hand. In one gloved hand he held what looked like an oversized hockey stick wrapped in insulation, so that he could stop himself from bumping into the arrays. In the other he carried several two-meter lengths of plastic cable that would be used to “stitch” the pliable solar array back together.

“Wow,” a reporter gasped as Webb, reaching awkwardly, began threading one of the cables through the openings in the array.

“Cowboy,” MacDonagle hissed under his breath. He put his hands on his head and looked at the ceiling.

Van Sant spotted Charlie Truss, one of the reps from Hollenbeck, sitting in a corner, his tie loose. He looked miserable. But she didn’t feel pity for him—just annoyance. She went over to him.

“Whatever happens up there tonight,” she said, “things are going to change down here. Our only way forward from this fiasco is to show that we’ve taken concrete steps to improve QA and finally get some positive results.”

“I’m all for that,” Truss said. “But anything you do to increase QA is going to slow things down. Once that happens, the costs start increasing and you become vulnerable to budget cuts. If we turn our existing contract into a traditional aerospace contract with all those sequential steps and inevitable delays, we might as well say good-bye to the improvements to REACH that are in the pipeline.”

“If speed has to be sacrificed for a more reliable REACH, then so be it,” Van Sant said. “The contract has major flaws. You’re accountable for speed but not performance. We have to share the risk. We need a contract with performance-based incentives and penalties so that we can balance speed, quality, and results. Our goal is reliable components and systems that perform— and that should be your goal, too. We need to work as a unified team willing to push back on each other to get results.

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