[edlinfan]

> Important for these COVID-19-related findings was the lack of informal communication that the project team suffered in the absence of face-to-face interactions. In the past, JPL's success typically relied on senior members of projects and technical line organizations "walking the floor", dropping in for conversations at office doorways, or chatting in the cafeteria. Without these informal communication mechanisms, contextual clues and situational awareness were lost. Team members working the floor found it difficult to report problems up the chain over Webex, especially when attendees kept their cameras off."

> ... The lockdown conditions contributed significantly to the question of why Psyche and JPL leadership did not know of the severity of the problems with GNC and V&V until it was too late to correct course.

> ... The IRB recommends that, given these exceptional circumstances, the team should minimize remote work conditions.

JPL has been suffering a brain drain over the last few years, and it sounds like the remaining cadre of managers are not so competent. Remote work is a convenient scapegoat, but it is far more likely that the problem is an ossified chain of command and a lackluster set of communication tools (Webex, shudder).

[quacked]

I worked at NASA JSC for three years in the ISS cargo division; although I never interacted with the JPL teams, I did coordinate with a ton of people across SpaceX, Northop-Grumman, JAXA, ESA, Boeing, etc.

I simply cannot explain the level of organizational dysfunction in that institution. In many cases there were thoughtful and talented people in the job roles, but there were many blinding, glaring failures of basic information storage and availability across the entire org. My favorite example is having a hard time finding all of the requested cargo transactions for resupply flights in the cargo database because the "desired flight" field was a free-text entry instead of a drop-down menu connected to a central list of NASA flight title strings. I hammered on that issue for fifteen months straight and got absolutely nowhere with it, and I had a list of similar issues about seventy items long. If all of my issues had been addressed we probably could have reduced the number of people in the loop in cargo logistics by half.

The article is talking about leadership "walking the floor"--we had something similar happen, where I couldn't convince any of the major ISS divisions to fix their cargo data so we didn't have to interact face-to-face, but their higher-ups would call and email me to double check the status of a cargo request. They were "walking the floor" and "staying in touch", but only because they wouldn't (or couldn't) adopt any policies to make a streamlined system work. I don't know if the same thing is happening at JPL, but I have to assume that it is, given the pathological nature of the repeated communication failures I saw.

A well-organized institution should be able to provide clear visibility into their data and projects just through smart organization of their digital assets. If they don't have that basic competence, then they would be extra screwed by remote work.

[KeyXiote]

Agreed, speaking of remote work Voyager still going, that's fairly remote...that record must be platinum at this point

[sitkack]

There is another org that works on "Moonshots" that is not dis-similar.

Smart is in no way an adequate replacement for having your shit together. It can temporarily mask it, long term, no way.

[dtgriscom]

For the past decade I've worked for a company whose headquarters is 500 miles away. I have 3-6 video meetings a day with engineers at the headquarters (as well as all over the world).

Until the pandemic, I visited headquarters every few months to catch up with the teams. I found that in informal chats (in the halls, walking into someone's office, having lunch) I discovered so much that never came up during video calls. It's similar to, but worse than, formal in-person meetings with agendas; there's an activation energy people need to overcome to bring up something that may seem small but is actually critical to the project.

Someone in a video meetings with their camera off is even worse; you have almost no emotional connection with them, and it's natural for them to only "speak if spoken to".

[dmix]

> Remote work is a convenient scapegoat

It's the best thing bosses have going for them in terms of scapegoats.

Although you can't blame them for being uncomfortable with this level of change. Remote work mainstreaming, without the COVID excuse anymore, is a whole new experiment being tried for the first time widely in society.

[tjr225]

WebEx does exactly the same thing as any of the other video chat clients. At least it did the last time I used it.