What a world we live in, eh? We wake up on a normal, damp, cold January morning and here are pictures which have been sent from the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe. Beamed back over billions of miles of space from Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, show that our miserable winter weather is a good 180 degrees warmer than the hydrocarbon sludge on the surface of that distant planet. Makes you appreciative! Our inner geeks were grinning from ear to ear at the fun of it.
Huygens was a hitchhiker aboard the NASA Cassini space craft. That bit of expensive hardware didn’t get to Titan by accident. In fact, it wouldn’t have made it as far as the pub on the corner if it hadn’t been for some brilliant high-tech project administration that guided both the European and American efforts over the decades (literally!) that the project was in motion. Cassini/Huygens (CH) took seven years to get to Saturn but the work that made it successful had started long before blast off.
Project management is something that we are all familiar with. It is what gets a car full of used clothing, semi-edible substances and bairns of various sizes, loudness and odiferousness away from the home driveway to a caravan by the sea while circumventing various opportunities for homicide along the way and returning home with enough bus fare to get to work on Monday. That’s contention for resources exemplified!
Now NASA, from past events and the worms turned up by the investigation that arose from that dreadful loss of February two years ago, wouldn’t usually be held up as a paragon of technical programme management. However, the technical management that its contractors used to guide the CH effort makes a fascinating IT management story with more than a few hints at how we might better juggle the competing demands and dearth of resources in any IT support or development centre.
Resource exchange
A fellow Earthling, Michael Turner, brought it to my attention that David Porter of NASA/University of California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, designed a scheme, called the Cassini Resource Exchange (CRE) to sort out the dynamic, competitive, inconsistent and often times virulent personality-ridden debates over resource allocation in the CH project. When the awards are handed out, Porter deserves a big gold one.
CRE is a slice of simulated world akin to The Sims, which you might catch your kids playing at instead of studying. There is a whole world of social and economic simulation software, both standalone and online, that I guess was kicked off by Sim City way back in the 90s.
Caltech’s CRE doesn’t sim a whole city. It is an artificial economic system that allowed the different CH instrument engineering teams to barter such items as power consumption and mass to juggle the design trade-offs—not to mention the tug of war over the financial dimensions—for this very complex probe. If this sounds a bit high minded compared to the down-on-the-floor turf battles between admin, operations, manufacturing and logistics that beset MIS execs, there are certain similarities (wildly fluctuating dynamics, competitiveness, inconsistency, personality-ridden, etc)
During the lengthy CH development period, at some point, the relative price of mass crashed, because there was a surplus in the mass budget. This was like your end of the budget year boon. Extra cash! Quick! Order something! Does this sound familiar?
The opposite was also true at other times in the production development. It was a generational struggle for scientists and technicians to develop produce and operate the space craft technical systems in hopes of a stream of ones and zeros filtering in from the depths of space years later. This may sound eerily like the remote and risky pay off for some of your proposed projects.
Amazingly, Cassini suffered NO significant cost overruns and came out pretty much on schedule. Proof of the success of the technical engineering and CRE’s project shaping came seven years after its launch when a couple hours of video and data arrived through the ether. True, a missing statement in one operational control program did halve the data returned but what came back was certainly worth the postage.
There is considerable doubt that Cassini would have been anywhere near as successful without CRE’s constant and impersonal arbitrage which elegantly and efficiently substituted for a techno-bureaucracy (seldom described in those terms) and endless committee meetings. Those technical paper-passing fiefdoms seem to sprout like weeds from the rich compost of many big IT projects, and often do little to constrain the budget, improve quality or hasten delivery.
Space-age management
Resource exchange systems have also been used for the Space Shuttle manifest management, and have been talked about for the International Space Station but never, to our knowledge, implemented. They tend to get used where nothing else works very well, instead of getting used everywhere they could offer benefits, as Mr Turner and I jointly rue.
Lest you think that CRE is a bit of pie in the sky for space cadets only, it has been used by California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District’s RECLAIM program to mediate the buying and selling of emissions allowances to help meet air pollution reductions required by the federal government.
The US state of Illinois is also adapting CRE to manage organic wastes. The city of Vancouver in Canada is seeking to adapt the system to help manage air pollution. In the parched South West, Arizona is considering CRE to help determine allocations in its Central Arizona Water Project.
The feds at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have contracted with Caltech to use the Cassini system in auctioning wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum to personal communications industries, a very earthly conundrum.
At the moment CRE and its kin are big project handlers, but it is inevitable that as more computing power arrives lower down the corporate scale, a market for this sort of facility will develop in medium size enterprises. Commercial, if not quite off-the-shelf, products will arise and become an essential element in the competitive business matrix.
Anywhere there are complex, dynamic and antagonistic demands on resources, a CRE-like solution could apply. Proof that CRE is edging downwards from governmental-scale applications come from the world of online gaming where simulated ‘economies’ are springing for the unlikely source of simulation games like Project Entropia.
Economist imprimatur
An organ no less august than The Economist has recently advanced the pitch of Professor Edward Castronova, an expert on virtual economies at Indiana University in the American heartland.In his forthcoming book, Synthetic Worlds, Castronova has been considering whether the real world could be better run by importing some of the resource exchange strategy and tactics that have spontaneously coalesced in the world of on-line gaming. Addicts of role-playing games such as EverQuest or World of Warcraft have been trading on-line virtual item for virtual item and, increasingly, virtual item for real world cash. Need an extra axe to slay the ogres in your virtual playground? There’s a market for it. An artificial economy has been created without typing a single line of code!
Although many of these ad hoc resource allocation systems sprang up over the non-structured Internet channels of IRC, newsgroups and e-mail, others are using the database-generated and more secure established forums like eBay. But whether these are loose as a goose or strictly orchestrated, resource allocation with a spirit of fun and mutual goal achievement has got to be better than a management whip!
No doubt the steely eyed managers among you have seen the contrast between the enthusiasm and dedication invested in eBay trading, on-line gaming and personal e-mail correspondence between 9 and 5 and the lethargy with which the more boring workaday tasks like clearing the jam in the cheque-writing printer down in the accounting bailiwick are addressed. The task of management is to pick the right tool for the workers to wield not beat them over the head with it.
Sure, we’d all like to be swanning around a winter wonderland, visiting far off Titan or the terrestrial equivalent (New York given its current inclement weather?) but somebody has to get the work done so that the lights stay on and a carload of bairns heading for the coastal precincts next summer can be reasonably contemplated.
If we are already working as hard as we can, maybe it’s time to work smarter and enjoy playing the game of resource allocation. Clear that jammed printer and fix the cause, and you’ll get a spare war axe; let it fester and soon the orcs will come to call.
29/03/04
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