title: Recalling what competence looks like link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/recalling-what-competence-looks-like/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 278 created: 2009/07/23 15:03:00 created_gmt: 2009/07/23 15:03:00 comment_status: open post_name: recalling-what-competence-looks-like status: publish post_type: post

Recalling what competence looks like

[caption id=”attachment_2213” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”WOULD IT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN NOW?”][/caption]
Really good article up on The Register about the team that brought us the Lunar Orbiters. The subtitle for To the moon - with extreme engineering is what initially caught my eye: “Spontaneous, improvised - would it be allowed to happen now?”. An obviously rhetorical question. The crux of the matter is in this paragraph that comes part way through the piece:

The Langley team’s success prompted some “What went right?” analysis. Erasmus Kloman, at the National Academy of Public Administration, was given the job of finding out. NASA published a redacted version of his report, Unmanned Space Project Management: Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter, which found that bureaucracy was kept to a minimum, while keeping sharply defined goals, and inter-agency turf wars were largely absent.

The author’s comment that follows reveals the sharp contrast with what you find in both public and private projects today:

This was before the era of “corporate re-engineering” - where innovation came to mean reshuffling the administration, rebranding, and a high turnover of management fads. It’s impossible to conceive how the EU or the US could achieve such results in a short space of time today. The modest space programs today take many years to omplete.

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