Systems design and why today's anniversary is important

The night of the 20^th/21^st July is an anniversary we seem to forget all too readily and yet it will probably be one of the few dates in the 20^th century that will go down in the history books.  It was when, in 1969, man first properly transcended the globe:  the day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Many people recalling the space programme think only of the astronauts – in popular history they are the ones remembered.  But the achievement had a cast of thousands and, for me, one of the most astounding things about the whole Apollo era – and one reason why I lecture on it even today – is the sheer scale of the management behind it.

There was less than the full ten years available to NASA when Kennedy announced that America would land a man on the moon within the decade and bring him safely back to Earth.  At the time of that announcement, man had been no more 250 miles above the Earth.  Kennedy was charging NASA with sending man 250,000 miles -1,000 times further - from the Earth in a short eight years.  It would require rockets 40 times larger than ever been built before,  the largest ever land transporters, the largest transport aeroplanes,  the largest free-standing building that had ever been built, and some of the biggest computers and some  of the smallest of their time.  New methods of manufacturing, of navigation, new foods, new materials, even down to new methods of packing parachutes were needed.

At during that period – 8 years - NASA grew from a couple of thousand employees and a handful of contractors, to over 35,000 direct employees, and around 450,000 workers directly employed by over 20,000 contractors, subcontractors and other government agencies.  The total budget ran to USD$24 billion. 

As a result NASA also had to invent new management techniques.  Its management rapidly had to learn the hard way about budgeting and quality control and develop techniques we still apply today such as phased planning, configuration management, PERT analysis and systems engineering – all terms themselves invented for the missile programme.  The rigorous methodology – enforced after the Apollo 1 fire – showed up nowhere more than then in the differences between the failure of the fledging European Launcher Development Organisation in the 1960s and the later success of the European Space Agency and the Ariane launcher subsequent to their adoption of these techniques.

It is impossible to do this justice in a single blog.  It is even hard to convey the level of the issues involved.  There were 5 major manufacturing centres across the US to co-ordinate; and thousands of subsidiary locations for those contractors each with their own subcontractors, all of whom needed to develop their components to fit perfectly together and on time.  And those components needed to work first time, every time, once in space.  There were, of course, fail-safes built in with as many back-ups as possible, but even if failure was not fatal (and space is an unrelenting environment) component failure could easily prejudice the decade deadline, as the Apollo 1 fire nearly did.   Critical therefore was design and control.  

As one senior engineer put it:  “If you get the design right and you manufacture it right, you shouldn’t need to test it.  All the testing does is wear the components out and ensure they were more likely to fail.”  And, as was pointed out, how many Apollo Saturn spacecraft would you need to test launch to ensure 100%reliablity:  if you had to do it that way, you wouldn’t get to the moon in a hundred years.

Ok, that is rather a radical approach and, of course, components were tested.  But they were also rigorously controlled.  Not only for example, could management tell exactly the compositions of the various aluminium alloys used in fabrication and which manufacturer made it in what batch, they could tell you where, when and by whom, the aluminium was mined, down to the precise seam it came from.

As Dr George Mueller, Associate Administrator of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight, said in an interview:  “Reliability analysis should be in the design process.  You can’t measure reliability in, you have got to design it in”.

And this was true – and remains true – not only about hardware.  It is true about all management systems and was applied through the Apollo program in that way.  Reliability needs to be designed into human resources systems, into accounting systems, into corporate governance systems, into all critical systems from day one.  And the systems need to be looked at as a whole: hardware, software and manuals do not make a system.  People, processes and relationships make the system and we all too often forget this in business.

To take one example, probably closer to home for those who work in the city.  Most mergers, we hear, fail to deliver any value.  The whole becomes less than the sum of the parts and that is often down to failure to plan the proper systems – and more often than not – a failure to understand where people and relationships fit into those systems.

There are many lessons to be learnt from the Apollo program and one that many businesses still need reminding of again and again is:  understand, design and manage the systems properly and you can, in Dr Mueller’s words “do  the impossible”.