% title ISSDC Training: Management

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<h2>Management Practices</h2>

<p>In the Space Settlement Design Competition, you and your team
members are emulating the way companies work when they are bidding to
win contracts for new business. Preparation of a winning proposal is a
large, complex task, which requires a variety of skills. In industry,
the technical skills required to win and perform a contract exceed the
abilities of individuals working alone. Hundreds, thousands, or even
tens of thousands of employees must work together to achieve the goal
of producing products that do what they are supposed to do, are ready
when promised, and can be made for the predicted costs. Each piece of
the design may be created by different people or groups, yet the entire
integrated product must operate as if it were one thing. </p>

<p>Just collecting skilled people in a building and telling them to go
to work will not make a product happen. In the Design Competition, just
collecting your team in a room will not make your design and proposal
happen. Each person has different skills, different priorities for what
is important in the design, different ideas about what the design should
include, and even different perceptions about what the RFP requests. If
your team is to produce a winning proposal, design decisions must be
made, team members must agree on how all the components fit together,
and disagreements must be resolved. </p>

<p>Teams in industry go through the same processes. As companies grew
and products became more complex, companies invented organizational
hierarchies that enabled their teams to create designs and produce
products without becoming paralyzed in disagreement and personal
agendas. Many different types of organizational structures have evolved,
to meet the needs of many different companies. Huge organizations that
produce a single, large product line (like an airplane or spacecraft) have
different organizations than huge companies where most employees work on
several different small projects. Successful companies find organizational
structures that work. Some companies fail because their organizational
structures inhibit communication or suppress good ideas. </p>

<p>The business of making organizations work is called management.
Being a manager is not like being King. The modern manager feels
uncomfortable being considered a ``boss'', and must behave more like
a leader. The manager's task is a combination of coaxing employees to
be innovative, committed, and productive; keeping customers happy and
enthusing them to buy more products; assuring the press and the public
that the company behaves responsibly; balancing income and expenditures so
that the company makes a profit and the stock value increases; and using
technical knowledge to make or approve product decisions, resolve design
disputes, and improve production processes. Each individual manager
will have more or fewer of each of these responsibilities--and will
take the blame for anything perceived to be imperfect about the work
done or decisions made by people reporting to him or her. It is hard,
frustrating, demanding work. It is not unusual for managers to work
eight hours per day attending meetings and tending to their employees'
concerns, and another four hours per day doing their own work--typically
preparing presentations for meetings, reviewing reports and budgets,
getting smart for technical decisions, and making plans for the future
of the organization. </p>

<p>Some of these management challenges will be experienced by teams
in the Space Settlement Design Competition. No one person will
prepare all aspects of the design, or write all of the text in the
proposal. Individuals must be assigned to create every part of the
design, write every section of the proposal text, and prepare each figure
and chart. There will be some parts of the task nobody wants to do;
management must find a way to get it done. There will be differences
of opinion or conflicting ideas about designs; management must resolve
them. The proposal may have too many pages, the dimensions of adjacent
parts of the design may not match, two different functions may need to
go in the same place, the cost data may have missed a few parts of the
construction process. It all has to be fixed.

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<p>The Competition co-founders define an organization structure for the
Finalist companies (companies are made up of trios of Finalist Teams) that
at least provides a structure for resolving differences; it is shown in
the Figure. This is a simplified version of a very basic and traditional
organizational structure that was common in aerospace companies during
the 1960's and 1970's. Each of the engineering departments roughly
corresponds to the requirements described in a section of the RFP. A
Director in charge of each engineering department is expected to make
sure everything in the corresponding RFP section is addressed in the
design and documented in the proposal. Each engineering department,
however, also must communicate with the others: Structural Engineering
must allocate a part of the settlement for facilities (e.g., homes,
water treatment, robot maintenance) designed by the other departments,
every department needs computer and robot services designed by Automation
Engineering, and so on. It is the responsibility of the Engineering
Vice President to make sure this communication happens, and to resolve
design conflicts (e.g., Human Engineering may want a lake in a park, and
Operations Engineering may have difficulty transporting enough water to
fill the lake). The Marketing Vice President is responsible for making
sure the entire Proposal comes together and coherently describes the
space settlement design (i.e., sells the product).  Marketing needs
to get the data from Engineering, and may want to influence the design
or enhance text to produce a more sellable product. If these disputes
cannot be resolved between Engineering and Marketing, the President must
either find a consensus, get a compromise, or edict a decision. The
President has overall responsibility for making sure everything gets
done, and the proposal is completed by the deadline. This includes
assigning responsibility for meeting requirements in RFP sections that
don't correspond to engineering departments. This process will probably
include setting schedules that identify deadlines for finalizing design
decisions, completing text sections, reviewing all the materials,
resolving incompatibilities or ``filling holes'', and sending the
completed product to the judges. </p>

<p>Industry relies on professionals who are experts in different
fields to work on design details, and engineering managers with
more general knowledge to integrate the pieces together. Nobody in
the organization needs to know everything required to complete the
design process; the organization does, however, need both ``jacks of
all trades'' and ``masters of one''. In the Finalist Competition,
this situation is emulated by having every student attend one of
five training sessions, depending on each person's position in the
organization chart. The Technical Sessions on Structural Engineering,
Operations Engineering, Human Engineering, and Automation Engineering
provide background information and teach skills to help team members in
preparing the corresponding parts of the design. They also learn how
every department both owes products to each of the others, and needs
to get products from each of the others. In the Management Session,
Presidents and Vice Presidents of the four competing companies learn
about customer priorities, management responsibilities, and interpersonal
situations that will have to be resolved in order for companies to
achieve design decisions and produce briefings that will be presented
to the judges. Qualifying Competition teams can emulate this kind of
knowledge distribution, by assigning some individuals to research and
understand certain aspects of the design in depth, while others seek
general understanding of the space settlement design priorities. Managers
can do research to help themselves perform their tasks, too; books
like <i>The Complete Idiot's Guide to Project Management</i>, <i>The
Brass Tacks Manager</i>, and Eliyahu Goldratt's novels <i>The Goal</i>
and <i>The Critical Chain</i> can provide background information. </p>

<p>For the Finalist and Semi-Finalist Competitions, a real manager from
industry or government is assigned to serve as CEO of each competing
company, with responsibilities to help keep team members communicating
and focussed on the goal to prepare and present a design by the deadline.
Your team is also welcome to recruit people who are managers in real
life to serve as CEO or provide other assistance in your preparation
of a design and proposal for the Qualifying Competition.  The Teaching
Materials section on ``Mentoring Teams'' describes how non-students can
participate with your Space Settlement Design Competition team. Please
remember, however, that your team will be assigned a new CEO if you are
invited to the Finalist Competition.  </p>

<p>Alumni of Space Settlement Design Competitions tell us that achieving
effective communication is often the most challenging task of the
weekend. This is true in industry, too. It is probably also true for
most Qualifying Competition teams. If your team managers concentrate on
effective communication, every other aspect of the design process can
be accomplished more smoothly.

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