PM Group 5- Jet Propulsion Lab

PGP/22/258 SATYAJIT ROY

PGP/22/064 ANJANA RAJMOHAN
PGP/22/370 PRATIK VIJAY TAGWALE
PGP/22/062 ALLU SIV SWAROOP
PGP/22/036 NITISH KUMAR

1. Should Lee recommend the launch or delay of Mars Mission? How

do you decide this?

New issues continued to crop in despite the tiger team and project engineers having solved most
of the BMSA instruments issues. The remaining critical reasons were

•BMSA – Risks were reduced to 3 but overall BMSA remained a yellow risk
•Landing site- red zone risk with score of 15.

The overall probability of success of the EDL stage was about 80% which was below the
board mandated 96% probability of success for recommending a launch.
Hence it is recommended that the project be delayed. Also delaying the project would
facilitate

•New images which would reduce the likelihood of landing site failure below 5%.
•Developing, testing and if successful substitute new components in the BMSA package.
•Comparing costs associated with delay $149-$298 million (20-40% of $ 745 the cost of the
entire project),and the cost of losing multiple projects in the pipeline and the failure of the
mission ,it was better to delay the launch

3 BMSA Landing
Site
2 Radar SSAS

1 2 3 Heat 5
Shield,
Parachute,
Solar
Array
4
2. Identify principal risk management processes in MBE?  What roles
each play? 

The MBE project had a 12 person risk review board, chaired by Lee and comprising experienced
and respected technical experts from JPL, NASA and the projects prime contractor. The review
board created a culture of intellectual confrontation during three critical review meetings during the
project.

Preliminary Mission and Systems Review- Occurred 51 months before target launch date.

Critical Design Review- Occurred 22 months before target launch date.

Critical Events Readiness Review- Occurred 7 weeks before target launch date.

The MBE project team identified critical risks through a project risk assessment process that
classified each mission or implementation risk along two dimensions-consequences if risk occurred
and likelihood of risk occurrence.

The team assessed the risks likelihood of occurrence based on experience, an estimate inferred
from a statistical sample, or an educated guess.
The team displayed the criticality of each risk on a two dimensional ‘heat map’ .Each cell
represented the product of risk’s likelihood and consequence. Based on this the risks were classified
as –

! Risks with score<=5 Green Zone

! Risks with score(6-12)Yellow Zone
! Risks with score(>=15)Red Zone

3. Do you consider Lee as a Good Chief Risk Officer (CRO)?  Justify your
decision.

Lee was a good Chief Risk Officer for the below mentioned reasons –
•Established Brand and Credentials- Lee, a graduate of University of Texas and MIT, had worked
with JPL from 1969-1976 as part of the Viking project team responsible for the first successful
landing of a spacecraft on Mars.

•Changing the organisational philosophy from “Faster, Better, and Cheaper “to “Intellectual
Confrontation”- Risk taking at NASA and JPL was rampant and culturally accepted especially
after the “faster, better, cheaper” mission which resulted in two major failures.

•Establishing a strong Risk Review Board - 12 member risk review board chaired by Lee
challenging, questioning project engineers and pushing them to constantly question what could
go wrong.
 •Having a Strong Understanding of organisational culture- JPL engineers from top schools used
to getting things right and got them to get comfortable with the thought of all the things that could
go wrong.

•Classification of risks right from project start- Known unknowns and unknown unknowns and
writing down every possible risk at the start of the project

4. What challenges Lee faced in MBE? 

1. PMSR stage there were about 6 yellow category risks which later in the CDR and CERR stages
changed to six with 2 of them being critical(one in YELLOW and the other in RED category).The
overall probability of success of the EDL stage was at 80% which was lower than the boards
comfortable
2. For flagship missions, costing more than $ 2 billion, the board expected a 96% probability of
success before it could recommend a launch. The challenge that Lee was the critical decision
whether to go ahead with the launch and risk the failure of the entire Mars mission which if failed
would adversely affect the future prospectus of projects in pipeline, and delaying the project
which could add between 20-40% to the cost of the entire project and require re-analysis and
diminish the reputation and erode the taxpayers and Congressional support for future

5. Is the risk management policy align with JPL's strategy and Culture

Yes, the risk management policy was in alignment with JPL’s strategy and culture. JPL
encouraged a “be bold, take risks” strategy which required risk mitigation to be embedded in the
lifecycle of a project and also intellectual confrontation. Risk taking was rampant in JPL whose
employees consisted of top engineers who were too used to getting things right always. This was
a major improvement over the “Faster, better, cheaper“ strategy which overlooked critical risk
factors at the cost of project launch leading to project failure.