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which Westrum has called pathological, it becomes impossible to convey bad news to superiors.16
Pathological
Culture
Bureaucratic
Culture
Generative
Culture
Don’t want to know
Bad news.
Whistle-blowers are
shot.
Responsibility shirked.
Failure is
punished/hidden.
New ideas are
discouraged.
May not find out.
Messengers listened to
if they arrive.
Responsibility is
compartmentalised.
Failures lead to local
repairs.
New ideas create
problems.
Actively seek
information.
Messengers are trained
and rewarded.
Responsibility is
shared.
Failures lead to far
reaching reforms.
New ideas are
welcomed.
Figure 1 Types of Organisational Culture (Westrum, 1993)
Figure one highlights three organisational cultures with differing degrees of openness. The
pathological culture has highly undesirable features regarding project performance. Such
organisations have an engrained blame culture which invites systematic dishonesty about problems in
the workplace. Where there is a pronounced blame culture the key actors do everything possible to
cover their tracks and hide the real causes of failure, thus adding to the problem of opacity.
Large Engineering Projects (Aerospace)
Before we delve into the real detail of why projects go off course we should say a little about how
major projects are organised. Taking aerospace as the example, the early stages of aircraft projects
often involve an elongated period when different concepts of the air vehicle are evaluated, usually in
partnership with potential customers. After the concept phase design teams move to detailed product
definition aiming to freeze the design. Such activities are precursors to the company formally
launching the project and offering the product to customers.17 After product definition detailed design
of the aircraft systems, such as landing gear, fuselage, wings and control systems, commences using
CAD/CAM tools like CATIA 5. However, this process, which on large programmes can involve up to
15 Chicago Tribune, (December 17, 2006).
16 R. Westrum, ‘Cultures with Requisite Imagination’ .in Wise, J. Hopkins, D. and Stager, P. (eds).
Verification and Validation in Complex, Man – Machine Sytems, (Springer, New York, 1993).
17 NASA, ‘Devlopment Cycle Time for Civil Aircaft’, NASA Scientific and Technical Office, (2001).
Why Projects Fail
8
5000 engineers, is now shared with suppliers and risk sharing partners across the globe. It is probably
impossible to impose a completely common tool set on all these participants, but because of this
interoperability is a major challenge. Intercultural and language issues also become more problematic,
with basic matters like metric/imperial conversion of data having the potential to wreak havoc. It
seems utterly incredible, but the failure of the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter project simply resulted
from the failure of Lockheed Martin engineers to convert imperial pound/seconds navigation data into
metric newtons.
Following the design of the aircraft’s structure and systems the fabrication of components, systems
and tooling begins, as well as systems’ production and static and fatigue testing. At this phase in the
project it is critical to be preparing the infrastructure necessary for production. Configuration control
bridges development and production by ensuring that it is exactly clear what will be produced and
what is required for that production. This may all seem very basic, yet in 1997 the US aircraft
producer, Boeing, completely lost control of the aircraft configuration process. In a huge and costly
production meltdown the 747 production line had to be shut down because of out of sequence
assembly.18 But the real problem was that aircraft were being offered to customers that could not be
built with the existing production capability. The product had become too complex with too many
customisations. 19
In the final stages of an aircraft development programme, following Flight Test and Certification, the
aircraft goes to its airline customer at the conclusion of the project. 20. However, during the testing and
certification process many thousands of modifications may be made to systems and component design.
There will also be modifications requested by those assembling the early prototypes. This is one of the
trickiest phases of an aircraft project, as a stream of modifications fed back into the design will
critically affect configuration and requirements. Modifications also have knock on effects and require
careful attention to traceability issues. Modifications required for the Airbus A380’s wiring appear to
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