NASA Wants To Be More Efficient. Just Kidding.
Earth and Life Sciences, Aircraft Ops Under Microscope in NASA Consolidation Effort, Space News
“NASA’s latest attempt to right-size its 10 U.S. field centers will begin with a focus on a roughly $3 billion cross-section of the agency’s nearly $18 billion budget that could affect some 10,000 civil servants and contractors, a senior agency official said here Nov. 20. .. Roe, former director of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, is co-leading NASA’s Technical Capabilities Assessment Team (TCAT) along with her boss, NASA Associate Administrator Robert Lightfoot. TCAT began in 2012 but will not be in full force until after February, when NASA plans to appoint so-called capabilities leaders to monitor its 10 field centers and point out areas where two or more centers are spending money on the same things.”
Keith’s note: Once a decade (maybe more than once) NASA spins up an effort like this (Zero Base Review, Synthesis Team, Faster Better Cheaper, ISO 9000 etc.) The team members semi-earnestly look for overlaps and synergies, suggest how to re-tune things, and then … (dramatic pause) all of the field centers promptly ignore the recomendations – backed by their respective congressional delegations – because: why change? We’ve seen this movie before. As such, you can ignore any and all “efficiency” TCAT babble from Robert Lightfoot and Lesa Roe – since the White House no longer cares about that babble (hey – where’s Charlie?)
The federal government actually has successful experience in closing / re-aligning bases. Would require congressional support to get started though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
NASA’s latest attempt to right-size its 10 U.S. field centers will begin with a focus on a roughly $3 billion cross-section
In other words, how many people could we lay off and where. And who would be teed off and do these ticked off congresspeople matter anymore.
Also maybe we could optimize some of that stuff by optimizing the expenditures, aka contracting it all out to these particular contractors. Because they are “private” and everyone knows private is more efficient.
“In other words, how many people could we lay off and where?”
That’s the easy part–the contractors will always be the first to go!
The hard part is how will NASA get anything done with out the contractors?
Flamesuit: ON
The other hard part is to figure out what all the CS people will do with no contractors to order around.
I will said: good luck, but it seems failure is the only option.
right before I quit my NASA career, we were visited by a rep for this program looking at all of our stuff and talking about where we even had redundancy within our center.
Seemed mostly like good suggestions, especially considering all the hoops we would have to jump through to maintain stuff that hadnt been used since the early shuttle days, and probably would never be used again. But I wasnt holding my breathe
Whenever the public asks where all their tax dollars are going, it is life science, earth science, and aeronautics that are trotted out as the practical side of NASA that returns value to the taxpayer, even though they are a very small part of the budget. So if the agency needs to save money, why crush the small research groups that are struggling to actually help Americans live better lives and create new jobs?
If our friends in Congress want money for their districts, why do they have to micromanage megaprograms? They could just fight over how much goes to each center and let the centers fund research they consider to be of value.
News Flash: NASA will open the Efficiency Center, in Montana, to help improve the way that they spend money – they will be in charge of recommending cuts at the other Centers. They will need buildings, highway updates, travel budget, mahogany offices for the Director, etc.
Consolidation does not always result in cost-savings, and can result in decreases in quality of work performed if not done well. NASA has gone through quite a lot of such consolidation over the years, resulting in significantly increased administrative burdens on researchers, scientists, and engineers, with productivity losses that overwhelm any paper savings. Unintelligent approaches to reducing perceived duplication in efforts also can harm quality greatly, particularly in research areas.
“resulting in significantly increased administrative burdens on researchers, scientists, and engineers,”
In the real world researchers, scientists and engineers have to do their own paperwork.
“reducing perceived duplication”
Perceived as in multiple redundant wind tunnels and propulsion facilities? redundant hangars and aircraft? redundant test facilities and vacuum chambers?
And without fail……..each and every single field center boasts their own little unique one of a kind facility that NASA just can’t seem to live without…..imagine that!
Let each center have a fixed discretionary budget which they can prioritize locally, and judge them on productivity. Hey, that’s already done with the Center Innovation Fund research and technology program. Which (I have heard) is about to be cut this year.
NASA can’t be judged by productivity–it’s not a business and it doesn’t produce anything, which is why ISO 9000 was so painful to implement.
Each center does have its own budget and is prioritized locally, but many times the priorities are not well thought out.
Just my opinion, but I think it was ISO 9000 that produced nothing. Originally intended to improve quality control in manufacturing, in NASA it tied success to artificial concepts of “quality” and “customer satisfaction” and became just another layer of bureaucracy.
Productivity for NASA is a matter of what we do that benefits our nation through improved industrial productivity, new jobs, industries and exports, and improves our lives and our environment and our relations with the world. There isn’t a simple number that tells how productive a federal R&D organization is. Most importantly, you have to listen to what industry needs instead of telling them what you want. You have to be familiar with the technologies, the industries, the environment, the economics, and the politics. You have to have the goal of improving peoples’ lives and the objectivity to see whether you are succeeding and avoid becoming tied emotionally to any one approach.
I agree,
ISO 9000 brought very little to the table other than large costs of implementation. It is good to make sure all of your equipment is calibrated and current so results should be reliable.
It just seemed that it was “cool” to be ISO certified and once NASA got certified we never heard about it or trained on it again.
I have worked in companies that were ISO certified and worked to certify ones prior to working at NASA. It is a good program if implemented and managed properly, but it needs diligence and dedication for it to work. If certain people just decide not to follow it correctly, and they are not brought into line, it falls apart.
There are certainly areas where money can be saved, i.e. in launch vehicle and spacecraft processing. It probably isn’t necessary for hardware to be shipped to every center before it is launched. But this appears to be another attempt to “consolidate” research, i.e. to stamp out scientific enquiry anywhere except at the center annointed to perform it. This is like saying only MIT can study engineering and only Harvard can study biology. We’ve had these turf battles before, and they don’t save money. They just cause the agency to lose even more scientific talent and research capability. Why not just let scientists and engineers at different centers collaborate? What a concept!
This is a great observation. Of course, the scientists and engineers at different centers DO collaborate – and they also compete. The combination of these drives creative thinking and innovation, which would be absent if only once center “owned” a particular research area or technology. Ten centers – the loose confederation of warring tribes – may seem to sap efficiency when viewed narrowly (at the level of a single project or technical area) but over a longer time constant it makes NASA better.