Apollo Guidance Computer Activities

AGC - Conference 2: Introduction of project management methods

Apollo Guidance Computer History Project

Second conference

September 14, 2001

 

Introduction of Project Management Methods

FRED MARTIN: I think there were two eras here that people are talking about that are somewhat different. There was the  small group, seat of the pants effort that was unfettered and unhindered, for the most part, by NASA and devoid, pretty much, of real bureaucracy. I think that, as Dan pointed out, you had a lot of fundamental engineering work  done during that period. And it was very fortunate that we were able to do it unfettered. I think that a lot of the fundamental issues on how to get to the moon were solved in this period of isolation or almost isolation and small groups.

These various flights that have been talked about-- I think the term, when Alex was talking, the term "system mother" came into my head. Or, "rope-mother." The responsibility was focused on this person for a particular flight even though it was a relatively small group. I would say, this is the pre- Bill Tindall era.

Somewhere along the line, someone did some back of the envelope calculations about how many lines of code we have to do. How many person months. How many lines of code per person month and things like that. And came up with a number of people that were just completely different than what the lab had in doing this work.

So instead of having 30 people, we needed 200 people or something like that. Not only that but we needed all this documentation. And we needed all these review meetings. And we needed all NASA supervision. And we needed a lot of stuff. At that point, there was the LM that was being split off. We became "professionalized." I remember one day and I can remember the day very clearly that there was an evening meeting about 7:30pm with Ralph Ragan, the head of the Apollo project at the lab running the meeting. The lab had been under a lot of pressure in previous weeks with respect to NASA coming down and questioning their organization and questioning their documentation and questioning their testing and questioning everything. I was told that evening that we were going to have different organization. We were going to have something called project managers. We didn't have any project managers. We didn't have that title anyway - even though you might think of a rope-mother being a project manager. 

That's when I was appointed the project manager of CSM software, and another individual, George Cherry, was appointed the project manager of LM software. These two programming groups now were fairly large. NASA now wanted to see formal schedules and time to complete this module and time to complete that module and reporting on a monthly basis or so. I can't even remember the schedule or what it was. But things started to build up in reviews and in paper work and monitoring and so on. I would say it became a different era of doing work at the lab, and much less fun for a lot of people.

SLAVA GEROVITCH: Can you put a date on that?

DAN LICKLY: It was after Gemini that NASA descended on us but I don't know quite when the date was.

FRED MARTIN: I'm guessing, but I would say it's either in the fall of-- I think it's the fall of 1966. I don't think it's in '67. I think it was the fall of 1966.

SLAVA GEROVITCH: What do you think prompted that change in NASA's attitude? Was it their concern over a particular failure?

FRED MARTIN: I think that's a very good question. I have an opinion. But it's just a completely personal view. The people at MIT were very smart, very talented. We certainly produced a lot. But we were also, I think, sort of arrogant from the outside. I think that that arrogance started to irritate people who were tired of hearing that MIT knew best and knew better. "You don't even know what you want, we know what you want and so on." And I think that that was part of why there was an effort to almost rein in MIT or to get them on this program not their own program. NASA is the boss, not MIT. I think there was a little bit of that.

Plus there were some perfectly honest professionals at NASA who had had experience with large programs and just felt that this was not going to get there in the manner in which it had been going so far.

SLAVA GEROVITCH: You don't recall any particular conflict that may have prompted this?

DAN LICKLY: Those operations guys that you see down in all those rooms in Houston were doing first Mercury and Gemini and zillions over and flight controllers and all of a sudden they said, "Now what are we going to do for Apollo?" They had nothing in the way of documents, procedures. All of it was really...

FRED MARTIN: NASA/Houston had this beautiful conference room on the sixth or seventh floor in Building 1, a really beautiful conference room. That's where they held a lot of their big, big conferences. They built a wall on the conference room of sliding, translucent boards that were like this blackboard, or whiteboard. They were white and they went deep, like six deep. You could slide one and there was one behind it, and slide another one. It was about the size of this wall. And you could move things from one side to the other and so on.

On this wall, they created a schedule. Today we'd call it a Gantt chart. And they had somebody who was taking care of this. Some contractor who would come up everyday with his blue tape or red tape or yellow tape and mark where the schedules were on all these things and what was going on. And they could roll this board back from that board.  This was kept daily by the contractor. It was magnificent to see it. That's how much they got into the schedules and the project management of the project.

DAN LICKLY: And MIT was woefully unprepared for all the tons of stuff and support and so forth. So they had to reorganize all together. And it would have been-- I don't know how it would have worked. There were a few people like Fred who really did a great job of dealing with them in trying to shake the rest of us up. Put on some reasonable forum for it. Plus there was Bill Tindall. But you had Tindallgrams that we dealt with who was up here a lot trying to work the problems. They would have said in those days. Say what you may. He did a great job in trying to match.

SLAVA GEROVITCH: Were you seriously adopting these techniques in your own group, or just shielding your group from NASA and allowing old practices to go on?

FRED MARTIN: There was a certain amount of shielding. But I would have to say, personally, I was trying as a project manager to adopt project management methods, and trying to keep track of schedules. And I was trying to encourage people to document things and put documentation in listings and so on and so on. In that sense, I was almost one of the enemy, if you want to put it that way. Looking back at it, people would still have those feelings that this was just all nonsense and in the way of getting this job done. NASA just didn't view it that way. That was part of the job. You had to work to schedules. You had to have reasons why you couldn't meet a schedule. You couldn't just say, "I know I promised this in two weeks and I couldn't get it."

MARGARET HAMILTON: But I think one thing that helped, it was a matrix management set up.

FRED MARTIN: It definitely was.

MARGARET HAMILTON: So Fred and George at that time were project managers. But then there were the functional managers. So while they were worried about the schedules of each mission, the functional people were worried about, hey, is this stuff working? The stuff we're supposed to be delivering. The actual, maybe, the man-machine interface part. This was a whole separate division. So the functional people and the project managers would, I thought, they worked together very well.

FRED MARTIN: There was a certain amount of tension. There's always tension in a matrix organization.

DAN LICKLY: Fred did a great job. Because he came to us and wasn't as high-handed as some people at NASA. And pounding on the table, "give me this or else."

MARGARET HAMILTON: Fred was like a psychiatrist project manager.

FRED MARTIN: You had to be a psychiatrist.

ALEX KOSMALA: Drawn from the ranks of the understood. I was sort of you, Fred, as Mr. Powered Flight. That probably was a fairly short period when you were actually working the powered flight problem. But that's what you were. And you were one of the guys that I needed.

Hugh Blair-Smith adds:

I had hoped for more mention of Peter Peck, whom we nicknamed Peter PERT for the vast charts he kept up to date. PERT stood for Project Evaluation & Review Technique, a/k/a Critical Path Method, and with so little graphics capability in the computers there was a lot of pencil-and-paper work involved. Peter was a colorful character in his own way: he’d squeeze his 300-pound frame into a VW Beetle, with the driver’s window always open so he’d have somewhere to put his left arm, winter and summer. And he wore short-sleeve shirts year round too. Truly there were supermen in those days.

Role of the personal background


site last updated 12-08-2002 by Alexander Brown