Huygens descent probe have lost one of two communications lines with which the probe communicated with NASA.

The communications failure occurred on Cassini, not Huygens, and was caused by an error "as simple as throwing a switch to, 'On.' We did not set the Cassini software to 'On' and it's our fault," said Jacques Louet, head of science projects at ESA. "Space does not forgive stupid mistakes, and we made a stupid mistake. I take full responsibility."

Possibly an off topic remark, but I think this reveals the weaknesses large organizations still face in managing large projects. One reads this and immediately wonders the simple question, "Didn't they have checklists? And didn't they go through their checklists religiously?"

Nowadays we expect large projects to be run with much more than just simple checklists. We expect project-managing software to be guiding the actions of everyone associated with large projects. We expect lists and sub-lists, and software warnings whenever a deadline is approaching, and more warnings if the deadline passes. But the old adage of "garbage in, garbage out" still holds. The computers can not remember what we fail to tell them about, so perhaps in this case the important step of turning the communication channel was left off someone's list, or it was added in incorrectly. I know in my own company we repeatedly promise each other we will use weblogs to notify each other of our travels, but we always forget to do so.

There remain informational limits on large projects. The price of information has, in a general sense, fallen dramatically over the last 30 years, yet some kinds of information remain just as expensive as they were 30 years ago. Here you have a situation where a programmer wrote the code to control the communication channel and made it the kind of thing one had to turn on. Getting that information from the programmer, or, more likely, from the spec they were writing from, was a problem 30 years ago and remains one now.

For now the answer to organization still seems to be the same one managers used a 100 years ago - more self-discipline on the part of managers and workers regarding checklists. Yet the failure of large projects reveals the limits of how much calls for more self-discipline can do, and I think many of us thought that information technology was going to automate some aspects of planning and thus allow the human race to tackle projects even larger and more complex than any yet attempted.

So far, that has not happened.




-- Lawrence Krubner

http://www.publicdomainsoftware.org