7 Minutes of Terror

Last month we witnessed an amazing feat of science & engineering with the landing of NASA’s Curiosity Rover on Mars. Before this could be accomplished years of preparation through innovation, design & testing had to occur. It all culminated towards what the NASA scientists and engineers at JPL call “the 7 minutes of terror” – the 7 minutes between when Curiosity entered the Mars atmosphere and when it was expected to land. Of course we know now that it was a fantastic success – but what made it so? How does an organization accomplish such a fantastic undertaking?

Well it got us here at PMG thinking; what is it that we do together with our clients that makes projects a success? We know we’re not rocket scientists, but it’s still fun to day dream & draw some interesting connections between the Curiosity mission and our own business and philosophies. 

1)      Planning: As with Curiosity this is arguably one of the most crucial stages in any project. If you don’t have a clear understanding of where you’re going, what you’re trying to accomplish and how you are going to get there then you are setting yourself up for failure. Pathmaker-Group has some of the best Project Managers and Tech-leads in the business. Not only are these professionals skilled at extracting all of the information needed as painlessly as possible – but they’re also experts at innovating on the fly. If there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that for any given problem there are almost always several different solutions available. Our job is to work with you to pick out the most effective one while minimizing cost. 

2)      Design: The Curiosity design team had many interesting problems to work around. One that I found most interesting was overcoming the distance problem. It takes 14 minutes for a signal to travel from curiosity to Earth and back. This 14 minute lag time would make it very difficult to control the rover on the surface, but it would make it impossible to land it. Fly-by-wire was simply not an option; so they innovated. They wrote custom code for hundreds of different possibilities; different input would in turn result in a different action being taken. And in this sense, Identity Management is very similar. 

We don’t have the luxury of putting human eye-balls in front of every IDM related task that takes place. With hundreds if not thousands of tasks coming through daily, it’s just too expensive. So instead we setup a system with logic designed to take care of these decisions. It reduces cost over time and it also removes the human error element that can cause security breaches.

3)      Installation: Assembling Curiosity was a labor of love for the elites over at JPL. Every bolt, every wire tie, every component built and assembled by hand. Here at PMG we like to think that we have this same dedication to our staging process. Whether it’s Oracle or IBM, the components that we select are specific to the purpose at hand. The right tools for the job is the motto here. 

4)      Testing: 1001 things could go wrong between Earth & Mars. And another 1001 while on the surface. Engineers at JPL had the daunting task of testing the rover through all of the stages from start to finish.

At PMG we take the same approach, for us the stakes are just as high because our reputation is on the line for every solution we put in place. We have a very regimented testing process that we continue to improve on as new exploits and possible problems are discovered. Before a single line of code is moved into production we need to be absolutely sure that it’s going to do what it’s been designed to do.

5)      Execution: Launching a rocket into space towards Mars is incredibly exciting, but for the employees of NASA this is just another day on the job. It’s something they’ve done hundreds of times before and they’re very good at it.

 And we feel the same at PathMaker Group. Although each project has different objectives, the process that we’re using is relatively the same. As long as the previous 4 steps have been completed we have absolute confidence that execution will be timely and successful. The heavy lifting has been completed, all that’s left is to push the big red button, count down to zero and blast off!