Faster, Better, Cheaper?

I've been doing some research into NASA's Faster, Better, Cheaper initiate from the 1990's. It's quite a story, and I must admit I'm stumped as to why FBC got scrubbed.

The results of the FBC missions were fantastic. For less than the price of the Cassini mission, NASA launched 16 mission, including the Pathfinder mission to Mars and the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), which no kidding, landed on an asteroid, after collecting 10 times more data than they'd expected. Of those 16 mission, only 10 succeeded, but that's still 10 successful missions for less than the price of a single planetary mission using the "traditional" Slower, Suckier, More Expensive approach (excuse me - I mean, the deliberate, modernist, Scientific Management approach, which never ever fails ever).

The crazy thing is, many people treat FBC as if it was not only a failure, but an embarrassing failure. As if NASA should have known better than to try something so absurd as reducing costs and delays in their pursuit of knowledge and adventure in space. As if 10 successes for the price of 1 is an inadequate track record. As if the data clearly shows we must "pick two," instead of pursuing simultaneous improvements in all three dimensions. I don't get it.

OK, I'm not really stumped. I have my theories about why the approach was rejected. But it's becoming increasingly clear that the rejection and ridicule of the FBC approach has nothing to do with the initiative's actual results, which were admirable and impressive.

How about you? What do you think when you hear the phrase "faster, better, cheaper"?

Writing Length

My buddy Rhet passed along this link to an article about the impact of the web on writing. And now I'm passing it along to you, my favorite readers.

Now, this isn't technically a project leadership issue, nor a military technology issue. But it is about several topics that are interesting & (I think) relevant to the wider discussion here on RPL.

The basic idea in the article is that the internet expanded the scope of possible manuscript lengths. No longer are writers limited to books or magazine articles. We can go longer or shorter, thanks to the magic of the series of tubes we call the internets.

It's just one of the many ways the internet is changing how we do business, how we communicate, and ultimately how we think. It affects what ideas we are able to share and discover. And THAT is the secret sauce of the whole thing.

Read the article. It's real good, I promise.

Best Practices - NOT

When it comes to flying, using flapping wings with feathers on them is clearly a best practice. I mean, just look around. Most of the flying creatures you see have flapping wings with feathers.

The ostrich, penguin and bat are notable exceptions - there we find feathered wings that don't fly, and flying wings that don't have feathers. And of course there are insects too - flapping wings with no feathers, just like a bat. So perhaps it's the flapping wing that's really the best practice, not so much the feathers.

But in fact the early aviation experiments involved both flapping wings AND feathes (think Icarus). It's not all that different than cargo cults.

However, it turns out that in order for people to fly, we're actually better off with fixed wings or rotary wings. Just something to think about when it comes to imitating "best practices."

FIST Handbook - Updated

Team Rogue and I put together an updated version of the FIST Handbook (pun intended - sorry!), which collects the best of our articles from Defense AT&L.

Unfortunately, the file format has some incompatabilities with Lulu, so the version you can download on RoguePress is out of date. The new version is 12Mb, and rather than try to email it, I stuck it on Rapid Share. You can download your own very version right here.

Enjoy!