"I told them to go and look at every rule we have and see if we still need
it," he said. "I'd like to see if we can cut down the number of rules by a factor
of two." And in the future, when a new rule is proposed, "I want to know what
rule we're going to delete" to make room for it.
Naderi is on that committee. He says JPL's bureaucracy is common to all old,
large organizations. Problems crop up, lessons get learned, and rules get written
to make sure the problems don't recur.
"It's like cleaning your garage," Naderi says of his new task. "At the time
you put that stuff away, you thought you needed it. That's why you didn't throw
it away. You go back after a while and realize you don't need half the junk
that's there. You throw it out."
The leaner, meaner JPL will debut this fall, Naderi said, and changes will
continue through next year. He would not reveal specifics. But he said much
of the effort will focus on figuring out what JPL does best, and then clearing
the way to make it happen.
"You don't want to go into the pizza business if you're good at carpentry,"
he said.
And so what is JPL good at?
"We're a missions house," Naderi said. "But it's not the fact that we do missions,
it's how we do missions. We are involved in the science, technology,
and the engineering in a very correlated way, and so we can sit down and conceive
a mission ... and see it through."
Torturous change ahead
JPL management faces an uphill battle against an ingrained university-like
culture, says Howard McCurdy, an American University professor and author of
four books about NASA.
"You've got bureaucracy analyzing bureaucracy to get rid of the bureaucracy,"
McCurdy said in a recent telephone interview. "It's torturous. The old rules
tend to crop back up again in the footnotes."
But he did not rule out the possibility that slashing rules could work. If
done well, missions would benefit and safety would not be compromised. But history
shows the smarter path might be to keep the rules, but to let mission managers
ignore them, McCurdy says. And there's a precedent.
No recent space mission -- inside or outside JPL -- has captured the public
imagination more than Mars Pathfinder, whose Sojourner rover puttered around
on the surface of the Red Planet in 1997 and provided close-up images of rocks
named Yogi and Stimpy to a fledgling worldwide Internet audience.
In McCurdy's eyes, the shoestring-budget Pathfinder project is the poster child
for faster, better, cheaper. But it wasn't the JPL bureaucracy that made Pathfinder
a success, McCurdy says.
In interviewing Pathfinder team members for an upcoming book due out in October
("Faster, Better, Cheaper," Johns Hopkins University Press) McCurdy determined
they had sneaked under the radar of some institutional double-checks because
JPL management was more focused on ensuring the success of the costly Cassini
mission, which launched in 1997 and is still in the midst of a 7-year journey
to Saturn.
"If NASA had known that the Pathfinder team would be on the cover of Time magazine,
it would have never left them alone," McCurdy says.
Elachi agrees that Pathfinder is a model for the future. But he contends that
not only was the mission well managed, but all the rules were followed.
Next Page: JPL, not IBM
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