Committees, Hierarchies, and Configuration Management

Between 1962 and 1965, NASA’s organization changed from a series of engi­neering committees to a mixture of committees overlaid with a managerial hierarchy. Similarly, between 1950 and 1964, JPL’s committee structure gave way to hierarchical project management. Schriever’s entrepreneurial Western Development Division also used ad hoc committees from 1953 to 1955, sepa­rated from the rest of the air force hierarchy. From 1956 onward, the air force hierarchy increasingly asserted control. These shifts signified changes in the balance of power between the hierarchical models of organization used by military and industrial managers, and the informal committees used by engi­neers and scientists.

The novel technologies of the 1950s required the services of scientists and engineers, who through their monopoly on technical capabilities influenced events. Schriever’s alliance with scientists in the 1940s and 1950s brought sci­entists to the forefront of the air force’s development efforts. In NASA’s first few years, engineers at the field centers effectively controlled NASA and its programs. In both cases, scientists and engineers extensively used committee structures to organize activities. These working groups generated and used the information necessary to create the new technologies. Knowing that Con­gress would pay the bills, scientists and engineers essentially ignored costs. Indeed, if they could have made correct cost predictions, these would to some extent have invalidated their claim to be creating radically new technologies. Schriever shared the scientists’ ‘‘visionary’’ bias. He argued for radical new weapons and the methods to rapidly create them by reminding everyone of the Soviet threat.

By the 1960s, the need for radical weaponry declined. When in 1961 re­connaissance satellites showed the missile gap to be illusory, arch-manager Robert McNamara, the new secretary of defense, immediately imposed hierar­chical structures and centralized information systems to assert control. Simi­larly, the air force asserted control over Schriever’s organization when re­liability problems led to embarrassing questions from Congress. Ironically, the methods used by the air force and the Department of Defense to con­trol Schriever were the methods that Schriever’s group had created to control ballistic missiles. NASA’s turn came after 1963, as Congress clamped down in response to NASA’s wildly inaccurate cost estimates. Air force R&D veterans Mueller and Phillips imposed hierarchy and information systems over NASA’s engineering committees.

NASA’s early history showed that committees could successfully develop reliable technologies, but only when given a blank check and top priority. On the manned space flight programs, NASA’s engineers and contract person­nel had ample motivation. With clear goals and a national mandate, formal control mechanisms were unnecessary. Informal methods worked well both inside and outside NASA, as NASA engineers exerted firm control of con­tractors through informal but extensive contractor penetration. As long as Congress was willing to foot the bill for huge overruns, NASA’s committees sufficed. When motivation was overwhelmingly positive, goals were clear, and funding was generous, coordination worked.

The history of ELDO illustrates how critical motivation and authority are

to an organization’s success. ELDO’s primary function was to coordinate sev­eral national programs through committees whose only authority was their ability to persuade others. Unfortunately for ELDO, the national governments and industrial companies were at least as concerned with protecting their technologies from their national and industrial partners as they were with co­operation. By 1966, both the national organizations and ELDO began to rec­ognize problems with this situation, and they created an Industrial Integrating Group to disseminate information. Without authority, neither the integrat­ing group nor ELDO could bridge the communication gaps between contrac­tors, leading to a series of interface failures and ultimately to ELDO’s demise. Without motivation, authority, or unitary purpose, ELDO failed.

The trick to designing new technologies within a predictable budget was to unite the creative skills of scientific and engineering working groups with the cost-consciousness of managerial hierarchies. JPL and the air force devel­oped the first link: configuration control. In both organizations, configuration control developed as a contractual association between the government and industry. Industrial contractors already used the design freeze as the break­point between design and manufacturing. Configuration control in the air force linked the design frozen by the engineers to the missile as actually built. When managers found that a number of missile failures resulted from mis­matches between the engineering design and the ‘‘as launched’’ missile, air force managers implemented a system of paperwork to link design drawings to specific hardware components.

At JPL, configuration control developed because JPL designed the Ser­geant missile, while industrial contractor Sperry was to build it. Deputy Program Director Jack James realized Sperry needed design information as soon as possible, so he required JPL engineers to document and deliver in­formation in several stages. At each stage, James and others integrated the various engineers’ information into a single package. James then controlled design changes by requiring engineers to communicate with him before mak­ing changes. This gave James the opportunity to rule on the necessity of the change and to ensure communication with other designers to coordinate any other implications of the change. This “progressive design freeze’’ worked so well that James imported it into his next project, Mariner. James and other managers expanded the concept on Mariner and its successors to include cost

and schedule change estimates with every technical modification, thus tying costs and schedules to technical designs.

The air force also realized that tying cost and schedule estimates to engi­neering changes was a way to control engineers. Air force managers and engi­neers from The Aerospace Corporation expanded the concept to include the development of specifications. Soon the air force made specifications contrac­tually binding and tied specification changes to cost and schedule estimates, just as it did for design drawings and hardware. This system of change con­trol for a hardware configuration, tied to cost and schedule estimates, became known as configuration management. Minuteman program director Phillips recognized configuration management as an important tool, and he imposed it on Apollo to coordinate and control not only contractors but NASA field centers.

Configuration management satisfied the needs of managers, systems engi­neers, financial experts, and legal personnel. Systems engineers used con­figuration management to coordinate the designs of the subsystem engineers. Managers found configuration management an ideal lever to control scien­tists, engineers, and contractors because these groups could no longer make changes without passing through a formal CCB. Financial and legal experts benefited from configuration management because it tied cost and sched­ule changes to contractual documentation. One business school professor be­lieved that configuration management was influential as a systematic way to resolve group conflicts in NASA projects.2

The CCB was the link between the formal hierarchy and the informal work­ing groups. At the board, the project manager and project controller evalu­ated changes from the standpoint of cost and schedules. Disciplinary repre­sentatives evaluated change requests to see if they affected other design areas, while systems engineers determined if the proposed change caused higher – level interactions among components. The CCB ensured frequent commu­nication between the groups. Through the linkage of hierarchies and work­ing groups, and the processes that tied paperwork to hardware, configuration management was the heart of systems management and the key to managerial and military control over scientists and engineers.