Team Work, Wernher von Braun’s Way!

This article is a Historical Essay Written and submitted by [[Grady Woodard]].

Grady’s Space Chronicles

Team Work, Wernher von Braun’s Way!

Dr. Wernher von Braun demonstrated a genius for engineering management. By the time he's 30, in Germany his team numbers in the thousands, yet he still maintained a breathtaking grasp of the smallest detail. In Huntsville, Alabama at MSFC, von Braun organized his team, devised a system for himself and the team members to be informed or participate in any project problems. He projected himself into the of projects so he or any team member could help resolved problems quickly. Team work was the order of the day.

Von Braun’s best was his weekly Monday Note reports, to serve as a risk analysis, from his organization communications system from lab directors and project engineers in the Research & Development Operations and from project managers in Industrial Operations which bypass intermediate layers of management. Von Braun read each note, he put his initial, “B,” and the date in the upper right-hand corner. He decided that key managers and supervisors would help keep him better informed.

To get the necessary input and much to von Braun’s delight, many lab directors asked their division chiefs for a Friday Note; the division chiefs asked bureau chiefs for a Thursday Note, and so on. In such a dynamic organization you have to keep up, keep the organization informed from bottom to top on the status of projects. This encouraged technical employees at MSFC to assume automatically the responsibility for problems they encountered. This meant in practice that when a mechanical engineer saw something risky in a design produced by, say, electrical engineers, he or she was required to drop everything and investigate the problem. No one was allowed to alter any reports during routing! Higher levels could only make comment.

The Team Work, Wernher von Braun Way, was providing team leadership and giving the total respect and control over an item to project engineers. The Germans had only to go to the one person that had the responsibility for a status, success or failure. The appointment of the project engineer came from the results of board meetings involving a Laboratory, Division, Branch, Section or Unit Heads and from the Scientific Group Leader. Sometimes the recommendations came from one of them or from other Laboratories or Agencies. Usually, a selection would be made from proven project engineers who had met his or her schedules and had no failures. No prospective project engineer was interviewed, they were just selected and informed in a meeting. Failure was not an option!

The complete authority was given to a project engineer over the assigned item including budgeting, development, mock-ups, testing, some design control, materials, process procedures, manufacturing orders, produce and design any tooling needed and to provide the production facilities if not available. They also had the decision to “make or buy” the item or make substitutions and contractor overview as well. It was always referred to as the “womb to tomb” responsibility, from the beginning to the end, including launch, reliability or success of the item. Project engineers always made reports truthfully, or else.

If the project engineer failed to meet his or her deadlines or was over or under budget with a substantial figure margin or had too much material left over, he or she would be withdrawn from the project and stripped of all other projects and was assigned as “an errands person” or given junk work by the other project engineers to aid them or risk being nothing but a “flunky“. After having the honor, prestige and the power of NASA behind you, it would be a disgrace to fall to the bottom pits. Some failed engineers gave up their jobs and moved on. Some stayed on and when the space work ended, a few were given lead jobs (go figure), being the only one left after the best had gone to other jobs in other places. In my option, this group may have been the reason why NASA begin to degrade.

It was this successful method that the German Team was betting on, then failure was not going to happen. With some engineers, failures did occur. For these people, it was next to being fired from the job. This then, became known to us as the German Way and we were fearful of it. The Team did not want to have a failure, they wanted us to make sure no crews would be killed. To that end, we were asked to delay or ignore the new procurement procedures that require “bids” on contracts issue to the lowest bidder. This is what Congress wanted, a chance to give work to their constituents. But for science sake, we were to give contracts or buy from the most reliable and the best design sources, not the lowest bidder. This was not documented, but we got the message. No one wanted to be responsible kill someone!