Are We Managing the Right Risks in a Technically Challenging Project? Avoiding Waste in a Great Mission With Poor Execution

摘要

With technically challenging projects, many are engaged to 'expand the boundaries' (of the 'knowns') and investigate not only the 'known-unknowns', but the 'unknown-unknowns' (as per United States' Secretary for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld's well-known quote [1]. Those who engineer exploration space missions as scientists and engineers understand this well. However their project success may be more sensitive to execution risks around teams, as met in all projects - issues mainly associated around people, than the technical and scientific project ones. It is noted that in a NASA context, a significant number of projects are developmental, and 'cost and schedule growth' causes a rebaselining, once the '...development cost baseline exceeds 30 percent.', GAO [2]. Unfortunately, as an example, the same report identifies the Orion project reduced the development cost by US$156.4 million, due, in part to moving funds '...from the development to the formulation phase, not [by] improved program execution, NASA [3] Potentially there may be less 'risk' when technical changes are made, but they may cause a disproportionate 'risk' increase associated with the physical execution (with people and teams). Thus, if true, it may be more productive to be more focussed on 'execution risks', to improve the chances of project and mission success. This paper is not focussed on any one agency or contractor, but in a general manner of understanding risk management associated with these types of delivery projects/programs, where there are high 'technical risks' that often overshadow other aspects that can, and do, impact successful completion - the 'execution risks'. Examples in this paper are taken from other, non-space projects/programs, but equally technical and complex, to see if lessons can be learnt.