Re: [non]Technical Management -- WAS: Re: Shuttle launch delayed until July

On Tue, 03 May 2005 05:30:44 -0500, rk
<stellare@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer) wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 01 May 2005 17:26:22 -0500, Pat Flannery <flanner@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Jorge R. Frank wrote:
> >>
> >> >Terminally naive. If NASA Watch didn't exist, NASA would have to create
> >> >it.
> >>
> >> Well, if you think about it, in an oddball way they did create it.
> >> Goldin's "slaughter of the innocents" sure got the thing going.
> >> "First Hired- First Fired" was a whole new approach to running an
> >> organization that relied on its brain trust to function. ;-)
> >
> > Relying on a brain trust is a lot different from getting rid of people
> > who were as useful as teats on a boar.
> >
> > I couldn't believe all the whining that came out of NASA HQ when
> > Goldin decided to thin the bloated ranks down a bit.
>
> I don't have the numbers handy but the way I remember it it was more than "a
> bit." I think it was like a factor of two or anything. It was sort of a big
> deal around here in the DC area as it was local news and of interest to the
> politicos.

Yeah, and it still wasn't enough. When Ken started at FRC, HQ was
only about a hundred people and there were people there with active
technical capability. It was the smallest piece of NASA.

> > It was as if
> > they'd been guaranteed their jobs and perks for life and Goldin was
> > betraying a sacred trust to get rid of any of them. Yet they'd pushed
> > for reductions at the field centers quite enthusiastically. They
> > seemed to think that NASA needed HQ paper shufflers more than it
> > needed engineers.
>
> But as you mention below, it wasn't just cutting out the dead wood and
> removing it. It was in many cases cutting out the 'crats and transferring
> said 'crats to the field centers while cutting at the field centers.

That's not what I said. There were no complement cuts at the field
centers, just at HQ, in that round.
>
>
> > "Don't RIF you, don't RIF me,
> > RIF that engineer at FRC"
> >
> > Can you tell that I'm not that wild about HQ types?
>
> Er, yes.

It's actually bureaucrats, not HQ types per se, that I don't like.

> > Some of them came
> > to DFRC when their positions vanished, so I have first-hand knowledge
> > of, for example, the manager who napped after lunch every day. The
> > napping didn't affect his performance much, though, because he had
> > absolutely no idea how to manage the technical field for which he was
> > supposedly responsible.
>
> But did he affect other people's performance? Did he snore, for example?

He kept the people who were supposed to do their jobs from doing them
and he had them doing useless things. I can't say much more without
giving enough clues to identify him, which I don't want to do.

> Serious question: Over the period of time that you and Ken were in aerospace,
> who would you describe the technical competence level of the managers? This
> is too broard of a question, so please break down the answer into three
> levels: 1) direct supervisor (Branch); mid-level management (Division); and
> senior executives (Directorate and Center). I think I got the terms right,
> please correct if not so.

It's better to break it down into line and staff, reflecting the
actual division in most technical organizations. This creates two
categories, Branch to Directorate[1], and Center. There are several
phenomena at work, though, of internal and external origins, that
really complicate this.

Dryden is so small that the personalities of individual managers come
into play much more than they do at bigger organizations. That can be
very good or very bad. It also makes it more difficult to assess
competence, because knowing and liking people tends to blunt the
critical faculties.

At Dryden, line management seems to have the technical competence I'm
accustomed to. It's better in at least one respect, the use of
computers, that the older managers didn't have (however, the perennial
problem of "it came from the computer so it must be right" is more
common than I'd like to see).

However, risk aversion is at so high a level that management spends
too much time on so-called risk reduction, even though it frequently
isn't anything of the sort. We've always been careful, but I think
we've gone a little too far in some areas (contrarily, though, we
haven't gone far enough in others).

Risk aversion has changed the prevailing attitude from being willing
to do things that might have some risk but also have a meaningful
result to being unwilling to do anything but things that have
virtually no risk. This isn't just at NASA, it's everywhere. DOD has
it a lot worse than NASA does.

As for staff management, they seem to be quite competent in their
areas of expertise, not that I could always tell, but the HQ
micromanagement has really dumped a lot of Mickey Mouse stuff on
staff, slowing them down. It does seem to me that there's less
understanding of technical matters in the current crop, which can
cause difficulties. And, as I said before, staff always feels like
the red-headed stepchild, particularly when staff management doesn't
deal with that well.

I don't know if what I see is a change in competence level or a change
in culture. Management has grown tremendously. So has staff. We
used to not have a lawyer and now we have three of them, for example.
Ditto deputies and assistants and administrative aides. Those people
have to do _something_ and the something they do isn't engineering.
They're not even bad people (they'd do less harm if they were, maybe)
and they do their best. It's just that their best produces more hoops
to jump through, more layers of review, more agendas to satisfy, and
so on.

Let's put this into perspective. Dryden has about 80 working-level
engineers. Everyone else is there to support their research, at least
in theory. That means that there are about 8 managers and staff
personnel per engineer. There used to be more engineers and less
support. Twice and half, I think.

[1] I don't think we have Divisions at Dryden. Or, at least, not in
Research Engineering and Projects, which are the two main line
organizations. I don't know about Operations or Administration; they
very well could have, I suppose. However, the place is small enough
that it would hardly matter if they did. Just another layer (see
above).

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer
reunite.gondwana@xxxxxxxxx or miliff@xxxxxxxx
.

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