PROJECT NEWS: The Official eNewsletter of ProjectWorld & The World Congress for Business Analysts
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PROJECT NEWS PROJECT OF THE MONTH - PROJECT OVERVIEW
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July's Project of the Month: NASA's Project Apollo
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PROJECT START
Project Apollo came about because of two political events. First in 1961 (during the Cold War) the Soviet Union sent the first human to space in a one-orbit mission. Second was the embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Project Apollo was a result of President Kennedy's commitment to respond to a perceived threat to the US by the Soviet Union.
PROJECT DEFINITION
Project Apollo was a series of human spaceflight missions undertaken by the United States using the Apollo spacecraft , which were conducted between 1961 and 1972.
PROJECT CAUSE AND GOAL
Primary Goal:
   -- To actualize President John F. Kennedy's aspiration of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the 1960's.
Secondary Goals:
    -- To establish the technology to meet other national interests in space
    -- To achieve preeminence in space for the United States
    -- To carry out a program of scientific exploration of the Moon
    -- To develop man's capability to work in the lunar environment
KEY PEOPLE AROUND THE PROJECT
James E. Webb was NASA's Administrator. 
Dr. Robert C. Seamans was NASA's Associate Administrator
Dr. Hugh L. Dryden was the Deputy Administrator of NASA
General Samuel C. Phillips was the Director of the Apollo Manned Lunar Landing Program
President John F. Kennedy
President Lyndon B. Johnson
PROJECT CONSTRAINTS

• The first challenge NASA faced was securing funding. The project cost $25.4 billion. 
• NASA had to quickly expand its physical capacity in the early 1960s in order to accomplish Apollo.
• NASA had to meld contrasting institutional cultures and approaches together into an all-encompassing organization moving along a single unified path. 
• Getting all the personnel to work together was a challenge for the program managers, within NASA there were various communities that differed over priorities and competed for resources. An example of this was the clash between the engineers and the scientists.
• NASA were faced with the challenge of deciding which of three different flight plans to the Moon (direct ascent, earth-orbit rendezvous, or lunar-orbit rendezvous) to pursue, while trying to minimize risk to human life, cost and demands on technology and astronaut skills
• Another major constraint was the time limit President Kennedy had put on them by promising to land on the moon before 1970.
  PROJECT SCOPE
  This project was of enormous magnitude. It was said that only the building of the Panama Canal rivaled the Apollo program's size as the largest non-military technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States and only the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb in WWII being comparable in a wartime setting. At the project's peak half a million people worked on Apollo, the majority of them were external contractor employees.
  PROJECT STRATEGY
  To bring some order to the project, NASA expanded the "program management" concept borrowed by T. Keith Glennan in the late 1950s from the military/industrial complex, bringing in military managers to ovesee Apollo.    The "program management" concept centralized authority and emphasized systems engineering.
  One of the fundamental tenets of the program management concept was that three critical factors -- cost, schedule, and reliabiilty -- were interrelated and had to be managed as a group. Apollo used redundant systems extensively so that failures would be both predictable and minor in result.
  To gain experience in uncertain areas, NASA devised smaller projects to ready themselves for Apollo. These projects included Project Gemini, the Lunar Orbiter, Project Surveyor, and Saturn V. 
  PROJECT FAILURES
  On January 27, 1967 Apollo-Saturn 204 was scheduled to be the first spaceflight with astronauts aboard. During a mock launch sequence a fire broke out in the spacecraft and the astronauts died of asphyxiation. These were the first deaths directly attributed to the US space program
  PROJECT SUCCESS
  The program management concept was recognized as a critical component in Project Apollo's success.
  In November of 1968 Science Magazine stated... "In terms of numbers of dollars or of men, NASA has not been our largest national undertaking, but in terms of complexity, rate of growth, and technological sophistication it has been unique ... It may turn out that the space program's most valuable spin-off of all will be human rather that technological: better knowledge of how to plan, coordinate, and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great social undertakings."
  On July 16, 1969 the Apollo 11 lifted off and on July 20th astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin landed on the lunar surface.
  Project Apollo was a triumph of management in meeting enormously difficult systems engineering, technological, and organizational integration requirements. 
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  WHAT IS THE BEST / MOST SUCCESSFUL PROJECT?
  Send your nomination to aioannou@iirusa.com and look for the Top 5 Projects in a future edition of Project News!
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  PROJECT NEWS JOKES OF THE MONTH
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  A Few Project Management One-Liners
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  "If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you haven't understood the plan."
  "If you don't plan, it doesn't work. If you do plan, it doesn't work either. Why plan!"
  "There are no good project managers - only lucky ones."
  "When the weight of the project paperwork equals the weight of the project itself, the project can be considered complete."
  "The most valuable and least used PHRASE in a project manager's vocabulary is 'I don't know'."
  "A badly planned project will take three times longer than expected - a well planned project only twice as long as expected. "
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  THINK YOU ARE FUNNY?
  Know of Any Good Project Management or Business Analyst Related Jokes? 
  Send them to aioannou@iirusa.com if we think they are funny we will include them in future editions of Project News!
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This Newsletter has been brought to you by ...
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ProjectWorld  &  The World Congress for Business Analysts USA
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