It's 'Just a Game'

Abstract

AFTER misguiding a $3.9 million satellite program over its budget by 50%, the guilty project manager simply shrugged and told himself that it was just a game-and it was. Besides money troubles, he was plagued for a week with such hypothetical problems as parts that would not fit together, sloppy technicians who short-circuited vital components, and memos from hig,h with warnings to drop everything and prepare next year's budget. Sometimes setbacks were encountered when it was found too late that some item had been magically left out of the blueprints. Happily tearing their hair through all of these perturbations were a dozen players, including nine National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineers and technicians from space installations around the country, two business administration professors from the University of Southern California (including the head of the Master's Degree program), and fronmi International Business Machines, the only reallife project manager in the group. The game was called GREMEX, for Goddard Research Engineering Management EXercise. During its five playing days, each move represented 4.2 highly compressed weeks of progress (or lack of it) in managina a simulated 1 3-month satellite project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Project GREMEX was actually the pilot effort for a possible series of such games, designed to teach the complex and ulcer-causing art of program management to the technical types who will probably be dropped into the jobs without any front-office experience at all. The director of the game, Goddard's Milton F. Denault, estimated that 12 man-years of planning had gone into the relatively brief exercise since the idea was born in 1962. All the players enjoyed the gamenmost worked full eight-hour days and then took their studies home with them at night-but they made their mistakes. In selecting seven experiments for the satellite from among the 10 offered, for example, players who tried to save money by contracting for only the minimum seven invariably found that one or two of them became hopelessly delayed or simply did not work as planned. Contracts were awarded late (resulting in a completed satellite with nothing to put in it), data were misinterpreted, and once, when everything was going smoothly, a memo announced that due to the failure of the previous satellite in the hypothetical series the entire program would have to be speeded up. Too much speed was not a good thing, however. There were financial penalties for being behind schedule, of course, but also for finishing too early. The Government does not fancy paying the staff of a project that has finished early for sitting on its hands. It is too early to know whether there will definitely be more such games, but there are so many people in the aerospace business in need of management training that it is not at all unlikely.