Project Management in the News, Vol. 5

Frank Winters - July 24, 2003

Here's a project manager's perspective on some of what is in the news this week:

 

The Project: The Orbitz website

The Story: Oracle blamed for outage

A recent article in Computerworld says that Carol Jouzaitis, a spokesperson for the travel website Orbitz, blames a July 16 outage on "an Oracle database issue." The outage was significant as the site was down for the better part of a day. The spokesperson told Computerworld that no loss or corruption of data occurred as a result of the problem.

 

The headline for the article is "Orbitz: Oracle to blame for site outage."

 

The quote regarding Oracle reads as follows: "It was an (Oracle) database issue, and we decided to make an architectural change to the site, a change that will put us in a position to move forward with even higher reliability," Jouzaitis said. "The site is performing great now."

 

PM Perspective: Seeking to place blame is destructive

Project managers are more concerned with preventing a reccurrence of a problem than they are with assigning blame. Witch hunts almost always end up burning the innocent.

 

But if we were to play the blame game, who or what caused this outage? The CW headline says Oracle should be blamed, as if a flaw in the DBMS caused the outage. If you just scan the headline you will come away with that impression.

 

The fix was "an architectural change." Sounds like it could have been some sort of sophisticated user error to me. Or maybe the architectural change was a work-around to overcome a bug in Oracle. The CW article leaves us guessing. The headline points its crooked finger at Oracle.

 

Carol Jouzaitis declined to explain what happened in detail, saying only that it was a database issue. In fact, the word Oracle was inserted by CW.

 

Bottom line--Oracle is in the news and can be controversial. It's more interesting to blame Oracle than a random database architecture issue (if that was indeed the cause of the outage). Personally, I'd like to see a clarification printed in the next issue of Computerworld. If anyone comes across a more detailed account please let me know via e-mail.

 

Project: Space Shuttle Columbia

The Story: NASA shuttle manager says she did not have all the information she needed

According to a New York Times article dated July 23, 2003, Linda Ham, the NASA manager of the Columbia mission management meetings, claims she did not have the information she needed to make decisions about the shuttle mission.

 

To quote the Times article:

 

"I was never alerted to the concerns that were expressed by the engineers working the issue, neither the severity, the potential severity some of them felt about the damage, nor the fact that they wanted the on-orbit image," she told reporters at a briefing here.

 

This statement was made at a briefing held on July 22 along with the release of transcripts of the management meetings themselves. The transcripts show that the managers believed the foam that struck the shuttle's wing posed no threat and was in fact almost a "non-issue."

 

According to the Times article and reports elsewhere, foam debris was ruled out categorically as a threat to the mission.

 

Recent tests run by the Shuttle Disaster Investigation board have proven otherwise. One test blew a 16-inch hole in a wing. Foam debris is now viewed as the most probable cause of the disaster.

 

PM Perspective: Can fixing blame ever help in the improvement of practice and process?

A July 23, 2003 article in the Boston Globe says Linda Ham believes no one was at fault in the shuttle disaster. Can that be true? Quite possibility. In fact, quite likely.

 

Yet the Times article quotes LeRoy Cain, the entry flight director in charge when Columbia broke up: "I have a tremendous feeling of something went wrong--in our system, in our team, in our processes."

 

It appears that to place blame on any person or single process step would be incorrect. The blame may lie in the NASA can-do culture, which has apparently become much less prone to self correction and in fact somewhat unscientific.

 

As is usually the case in project management, the issue is not fixing blame but finding the systemic cause in the process and/or culture of an organization. Once these causes are found, remedies can be applied. If an individual is blamed one might be lead to believe that the remedy lies in replacing that person. This almost never works, as the people at NASA seem to understand.

 

The Project: War and reconstruction in Iraq

The Story: The 16 words the President spoke, and who put them in the State of the Union address

The President of the United States is not the nation's ultimate project manager. He is not directly responsible for the information systems that provide him with information, but he must be able to rely on them to do his job.

 

The President is the CEO of America. As Chief Executive he acts on the information he is given and makes decisions based on the facts as they are explained to him.

 

As former President Harry Truman said, "The buck stops here." This refers to taking responsibility for the result of the work of many "project managers" and "middle managers" who work in the President's administration.

 

When asked at a press conference who takes responsibility for the inclusion of 16 words in a State of the Union address that referred to a now discredited report of an attempt by Iraq to buy uranium from an African nation, the President said that the ultimate decision to go to war was his.

 

This was an excellent answer that has been clouded by all of the Presidential aides who have rushed forward to take one for the Commander in Chief by taking the blame for providing incorrect information to the President. Some people assume that the President is hiding behind these blame takers and that he should step forward and take the blame himself.

 

PM Perspective: What is the function of information and how should an executive use it?

Effective executives do not expect others to make decisions for them. They do not manage by consensus among their advisors or the executives that report to them.

 

Instead, effective executives take on board the information and advice provided to them and then make decisions based on what they have learned and what their intuition and experience tells them. In other words, the decision making buck stops at the chief executive's desk.

 

The quality of information is what is in question here. The President's position has been that he had ample information to support the notion that Iraq posed a threat to the United Statesand its allies. He did not base his decision on a one or even a few data points, but on a great deal of information and experience gathered over many years.

 

Project managers who develop systems that are designed to provide information to executives need to be aware of the quality of that information. This is true of information about information as well--what is its nature, where did it come from, what is it related to?

 

This is because the executive will tend to believe that the information provided is real and true. Information that is based on gossip or speculation must be clearly labeled. Information that has come into question must also be labeled and characterized as such. Therefore, the information system needs to have the capability to provide labels--Meta data, or information about the information--that must never be separated from the information itself.

 

Apparently, in the case of the Iraqi uranium purchase that never happened, there was intelligence about the intelligence but it was separate from the report itself. It now appears that some documents that supported the idea of an African connection were forged. So the President and his advisors got half the message and may not have gotten updates regarding the nature of the information in a timely fashion.

 

This possible turn of events doesn't speak to a person to blame (other than the forger). It does speak to an information system that needs amending.

 

Project managers and interested folks everywhere hope the system has already been fixed.

Frank Winters has nearly 40 years of consulting and Information Technology experience serving as a technical developer, team lead, project manager, program manager, consultant and IT service industry executive. He currently consults, writes and speaks on program and project management related topics and is a frequent contributor to gantthead.com. He can be reached at [email protected].

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