June 27, 2008 Vol. 1, Issue 5
ASK the Academy posed five questions to Scott Pace, outgoing Associate Administrator of Program Assessment and Evaluation.
ASK the Academy: NASA has undergone a great deal of change since you came to the agency from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. From your vantage point, what have been the most significant developments that are likely to shape the future of the agency?
Scott Pace: you go from the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board to the National Space Exploration Policy to the 2005 NASA Authorization Act, there’s a clear policy line that gives the agency strategic direction. The prior agency governance structure wasn’t the most effective in terms of creating an integrated agency response to the Vision for Space Exploration. For example, roughly 90% of the agency’s budget is in space-related missions or programs. That means each of the ten NASA centers has to be somehow involved in space. That logically leads you to balancing work across these different centers, which leads to making judgments about what’s a mission requirement versus what’s an institutional requirement.
The organizational structure of the agency should be aligned with how the agency is governed. With the new governance model, there were two major changes. One was having the centers report directly to the Administrator. Previously, you had the centers reporting up through the Mission Directorates. While it might have seemed simpler to have a smaller span of control (with fewer direct reports to the Administrator), in reality it tended to suppress or put off certain issues that you would want to surface in a healthy organization.
The reason you do it (have the centers and Mission Directorates both report to the Administrator) is that the centers and Mission Directorates are responsible for different things at different phases in time. Mission Directorates are all about getting the mission done, and they tend to have very focused time horizons. The centers, on the other hand, are institutions, and they tend to be focused on what the’re doing today and what they’ll be doing in twenty or thirty years. So they have different time horizons, with the centers are responsible for institutional capabilities, whereas the Mission Directorates are responsible for missions and associated requirements.
Those are two very different aspects of the organization, and you want to have both of them in tension. You don’t want to have the Mission Directorates always trumping the institutional needs, because then you’re eating your future seed corn: you’re simply solving today’s problems and likely creating longer-term problems. On the other hand, you don’t want to have the institutions operating without the checks and balances provided by the missions, because there can be tendency to get set in a way of operating that’s independent from the needs of the larger organization. So you want that check and balance function.
Academy: As the first Associate Administrator for Program Analysis and Evaluation, what were some of the unanticipated challenges of establishing your organization? How did you manage them?
Scott Pace: One thing that is very challenging is that PA&E is an intensely interdisciplinary sort of activity. You have to speak a lot of different languages: engineering, science, cost analysis, legal, procurement, legislative. It doesn’t mean you’re an expert in any one of these things, but you have to bring in people who are experts, and you have to speak enough of each of their languages to be able to lead or manage them. You have to be fairly broad in the fields you can cover. That was expected, but living it every day is challenging.
There’s also a certain cultural mindset you have to have to do a PA&E-type job. It’s different than being a program or project manager where you’re totally focused on the mission getting it done and pushing toward a specific goal. When you’re at headquarters, on the other hand, you’re necessarily balancing a series of competing tensions and interests.
It’s very easy in this kind of role to be vulnerable to becoming cynical or arrogant. Part of the PA&E job is a check-and-balance function to question things and bring forward more choices for management to decide what they want to do. It’s easy to become cynical because you see lots and lots of mistakes that repeat themselves. It’s also easy to become arrogant seeing those mistakes, and what you have to get your people to realize is that they’re not smarter than anybody else. Because we have a privileged position that allows us to see across the agency, and our job is to see patterns, we should be seeing things before anyone else does and acting like an ‘early alert’ system. If management is reading about it in the newspaper or hearing from our outside stakeholders, we’ve failed.
Our job is not to play ‘gotcha’ games or make public points. Our job is to contribute to mission success, and that means sometimes taking more of a coaching behavior or a teaching assistant behavior. Our product is better decisions; it’s not a satellite or spacecraft. What does a balanced portfolio look like? What priorities can be afforded by expected budgets? Are the projects ready to proceed to their next major milestone? These are all senior management decisions, and our value-add is: do we, through our analysis, help senior management make better decisions than they would have been otherwise able to do? We’re not the decision makers we’re the decision support system.
The biggest factor in cultivating the kind of culture for PA&E has to have to perform its role correctly. Finding people who have the right character or attitude is just as important as technical content. It’s a given that everybody who comes in has to be an expert at something and have a technical foundation and skill set. But it’s also important that they come with the right mindset. It’s not an auditing mindset. It’s not an “I can manage the project better than you can” mindset. It’s a fine balance between being hard-nosed and objective and being there to help in that coaching or teaching assistant role.
The culture needs to be as objective as possible, which can be hard in the space business because what we deal with is very idealistic. People are very inwardly motivated, and they very much want their programs to succeed, and thus it’s hard to be critical sometimes. So while being motivated by the enthusiasm and goals that we have, the other half of your brain has to be really hard core analytic.
You have to be totally dedicated, and at the same time you have to be brutally honest with yourself. There’s a strong culture within the agency to seek consensus. It’s in keeping with the nature of a large governmental organization and it’s not a bad thing in itself. However, for PA&E analyses, I’m not interested in consensus — I’m interested in “are we right or not?” Even if our views are not accepted in the immediate term, over a longer range of time, were we right?
Academy: Based on your experience heading an organization that analyzes NASA programs, what broad conclusions have you reached about NASA’s performance in program/project management?
Scott Pace: We’re not as good as we need to be. NASA is an organization that prides itself on accomplishing very technically challenging projects, and therefore it tends to focus on engineering and scientific challenges (as opposed to programmatic challenges). There is a great deal of variation across the agency in managing programmatic cost, schedule, and risk, and this has serious consequences for us in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. It affects our credibility with the White House, Congress, industry, and academia. And given that budgets are limited, cost and schedule overruns rob our future initiatives and reduce opportunities for new initiatives.
The most serious management challenge for the agency is the transition from the Shuttle to a new generation of human-rated spacecraft. Within that challenge, the most important task is for the human spaceflight community to relearn the management and engineering skills necessary for new development programs. More needs to be done to share lessons between the human and robotic spaceflight communities and to create opportunities for flight hardware experience with a new generation of NASA leaders.
NASA hasn’t flown a new human-rated development program in more than a generation. We have lots of people who are good at operations, and we have lots of people who are good at R&D. We have pockets of people on the robotic side who are very good at development. Creating more and stronger development teams is where the real need is going forward.
In development, all the variables are moving — cost, schedule, performance, and risk are all up in the air. It is the most challenging and difficult field, because there’s never enough time or money, the schedule is always bad, and you’re always making judgments without enough analysis. You have to be incredibly experienced to make the right judgments in the crunch without adequate information. People who are able to function in that environment have an almost artistic sense as part of their systems engineering training, they have a sense of judgment about how to manage programs as well as the technical issues.
Our current state is largely a result of inexperience: we just haven’t given opportunities to enough people to get hardware hands-on experience. That’s a statement that’s true across a lot of the aerospace industry in general, as development time cycles have gone longer-term, and there are fewer opportunities to work on multiple projects. You can learn a lot sitting in a classroom going through PowerPoint briefings and listening to stories, but at the end of the day there’s no substitute for working on a launch campaign or a flight project. There have been relatively few opportunities to do that.
The organization is learning how to fly again. It’s not that people aren’t smart or aren’t working hard; they simply haven’t had a chance to do it before, and with Constellation, they’re getting that chance. Part of the idea of the Constellation program is to provide a flow-through of multiple projects, not one giant thing that you work on for your whole career. In a way, the science community already does this. They try to maintain some capabilities in-house, so that they have hands-on skill. When dealing with industry and contractors they do so from a base of real knowledge and experience. We need more of that kind of development experience on the human space flight side.
Academy: Do you have any personal lessons learned about leading a new organization within a government agency?
Scott Pace: First, top-level support and a clear sense of ‘commander’s intent’ are crucial. There are many subtle, detailed decisions that arise in creating a new organization, and it’s very helpful to be able to make those decisions in a way that reflects the values and priorities of your own management chain.
Once a new organization has been created and established, it’s important that the agency employees as well as the most senior level of management come to see the organization as serving the agency’s long-term interests. If so, it will be sustained as a worthwhile and effective part of the agency. If not, it will be at risk. That’s particularly true of an organization like PA&E, which has had to confront hard questions and present difficult choices to management in order to be of real service to the agency.
Academy: In keeping with your lessons learned, what words of wisdom would you pass on to someone else about running PA&E?
Scott Pace: Richard Haass (formerly of the State Department and the National Security Council) wrote a book called The Bureaucratic Entrepreneur that talks about something he calls the compass model: North is your boss, South is the people who work for you, and East and West are your internal and external colleagues. You want to have all of that in balance. Are you taking care of the people who work for you? Are you in line with where your boss is going? Are you paying attention to your internal colleagues and external peers? It’s real easy to just focus on one of those parts. It’s easy, for example, to fixate on what your boss wants, but it won’t serve you well in the long term if you’re not taking care of those other relationships. Conversely, it’s easy to fixate on what your colleagues think and lose sight of what your people need and your boss wants. Having that kind of balance, especially for a function that’s somewhat central to the organization like PA&E, is a good thing.
Academy: As you prepare to take a new post at George Washington University, what are you looking forward to exploring from a research standpoint?
Scott Pace: I’m interested in the long-term sustainability and budget trade-offs faced in all areas of government space activity, whether in the civil, military, or intelligence sectors. Given expected pressures on all discretionary spending, what are the most important priorities for the strategic interests of the United States?
I’m particularly interested in the management of dual-use technologies (as exemplified by the Global Positioning System, remote sensing, communications satellites, and launch vehicles), and the tensions between the public and private sector interests in space activities. I’ve worked on international governance issues in technology promotion and management, such as spectrum management; export controls, the flow of information from remote sensing systems, and the emergence of new satellite navigation systems.
