Columbia's Final Mission

5 questions to ask panel

1. How would you make your procedure of reporting to someone else better and less confusing so that everyone knows who they are supposed to report to?

2. One problem that I noticed was that the engineers felt like nobody cared what they said or that it didn't really matter to the people that were higher up. What problems could this cause and how could we solve this problem?

3. There was also a problem of a lot of people reporting only to one person. How could the structure of this organization be set up differently so that there were more than one person to report to?

4. How could all the committees that were set up in NASA work and communicate better together instead of each seperately trying to solve a problem?

5. It seemed like some people were more concerned about staying on the set schedule of the upcoming flights than the safety of those that were on board Columbia. Why was this a problem and what can be done about it?

5 Insights

1. One thing that was mentioned in class is how NASA has kind of a bottle neck set up. A lot of people report to one person and then that person reports to one person and that person reports to one person. One thing I learned that I hadn't thought of before was that by having an organization set up that way, it is hard for so many people to report back to one person and how it could be better distributed out. It got me to thinking why they would have it set up that way.

2. Another insight I had was about caring about your employees and not just your customers. And some points it didn't seem like the people at NASA really cared about those on the flight, they just wanted to get them back so that they could stay on schedule for their upcoming flights. Some people didn't even want to try to help them even if they thought they might be in danger just because they said there was nothing they could do about it anyways. It's important to care about your employees as well as your customers because their the ones who help the customers.

3. Another insight I had was when Bro. Adams told us the story about the employee at Nike. He made a big mistake and cost the company a bunch of money, but he didn't fire him because that employee should have learned from his mistake and wouldn't make it again. Whereas if he had fired him and hired someone knew, he would risk having the new person make the same mistake. I thought about that and how true it is and that probably happened to a lot of people at NASA.

4. One thing that was brought up was how one of the committees was trying to get extra picures of the spot where the foam had hit the ship and weren't able to because they hadn't gone through the proper procedure of requesting these photographs. It seemed like the proper procedure wasn't understood by all the people working at NASA because if it was they would have gone through the right people to get these photographs. Instead the order for the photographs was cancelled and there ended up being a lot of frustrated people. Good communication is neccessary in an organitzation in ever aspect.

5. Another thing that was brought up was that some of the people working at NASA felt like their opinion didn't really matter because the people higher up would do what they wanted to do anyways. I think this goes along with treating your employees well because if the engineer's opinion never mattered and nothing was really done about what they had to say, what's the point in them doing there work? Not only that but every single person in an organization is important and maybe if someone had listened and acted upon what the engineers had to say, the there would have been less problems with the Columbia.

-One place where I've seen the idea of treating your employees well so they will treat your customers, is at my job in the Admissions office for BYU-I. All of the employees and student employees are treated so well. We are respected and listened to. Because of this, we love to come to work and we help the office by treating our customers with that same respect.