Manage This - The Project Management Podcast

Listen in for Andy and Bill's answers to listeners PM questions. e.g: How do I get the team past the storming phase? When to hold meetings and how to conduct them? How to monitor projects closely and how to close them? What are future challenges for PMs?

Productive kickoff meetings are central to project success. How effective are your planning meetings? Learn what steps to take before a project kickoff and how to deal with challenging attendees from author Rich Maltzman.

Laura Butcher addresses ways to determine stakeholder expectations, as well as how to build and maintain trust with your stakeholders. Hear how to overcome cultural obstacles, and how to represent your company’s headquarters in a foreign setting.

Table of Contents 00:59 … Meet Heather 02:46 … Orbital Space Debris 04:10 … LEO and GEO 04:41 … Policy Standards 06:14 … Regulating/Interagency Debris Coordination Committee 08:24 … Assessing and Mitigation 10:24 … Coordinating with Multiple Teams 11:38 … OSD Observatory on Ascension Island 15:53 … Effective Communication 18:26 … Is There an End to this Project? 24:09 … Career Advice 25:57 … Measuring Success 27:31 … Learn More 29:03 … The Bill and Nick Wrap Up HEATHER COWARDIN:  But we need to figure out a way to kind of control its growth and make sure that all space users can utilize the space environment.  And that’s the best we can do right now. NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every couple of weeks we meet right here and have a conversation about what matters to you in the field of project management.  We talk with real people, doing real jobs, and find out what makes them successful and what keeps them motivated. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the chief motivators, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Bill, for those who have ever said that the sky is the limit with what we do around here, well, they may need to rethink that perspective a little. BILL YATES:  Yeah, they’re in for a treat today.  Heather is going to talk to us about the orbital space debris issue that I didn’t even know existed.  This is going to be exciting stuff. Meet Heather NICK WALKER:  We all know how much we rely on satellites in orbit around the Earth.  These provide us with services such as navigation, meteorology, climate research, telecommunication, and human space exploration.  Unfortunately, with increasing space activities, a new and sort of unexpected hazard has started to emerge:  space debris. Dr. Heather M. Cowardin serves as the section manager and project manager for the Orbital Debris Research Section under the Science and Exploration Department of the JETS Contract with NASA Johnson Space Center.  She also leads the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office Research and Development Task Group. Dr. Cowardin, it’s an honor to have you with us here on Manage This.  Can we start out just getting to know you a little bit better?  How did you get to where you are today? HEATHER COWARDIN:  Well, I guess let’s go all the way back a couple of decades and talk about my childhood dream.  I wanted to be Batman, a garbage collector, or an astronaut.  And here we are, a couple decades later, and I feel like I’ve hit at least two of those three points.  I’m a superhero trying to protect space assets in space from garbage.  So not doing too bad. NICK WALKER:  Excellent. HEATHER COWARDIN:  So I guess where I kind of got to from there is I went to space camp in seventh grade after I won a fellowship from the Society of Women Engineers.  I was going to school at University of Houston, got an internship that turned into a full-time job, that turned into basically being a lead, into a deputy manager, into a full-on manager, to here we are now.  So been at NASA a good 15 years. NICK WALKER:  So you’re concentrating on space debris.  I think this is something that maybe escapes the radar of a lot of people. HEATHER COWARDIN:  Aha.  See what you did there. Orbital Space Debris NICK WALKER:  Yeah.  What is orbital space debris? HEATHER COWARDIN:  Right.  So it’s any manmade object that no longer serves a useful purpose.  So what does that mean?  Spent upper stages.  Mission-related debris.  Carriers for multiple payloads.  Even something as small as paint flakes, those can be very damaging. NICK WALKER:  How much of it is there? HEATHER COWARDIN:  There’s about 19,000 objects in space right now that are greater than 10 centimeters.  That threshold is basically the limit of where our sensors can track debris.  But in general there’s probably a good 23,000 or plus that are greater than 10 centimeters, 500,000 that are in the one centimeter range, and a good hundred million that are about the size of a grain of salt.  This is a serious problem. ANDY CROWE:  And I guess this stuff is moving at high velocities in some cases? HEATHER COWARDIN:  Yeah.  They’re going about 10 kilometers per second in LEO.  So in order to kind of get that into real world terms, that’s about 36,000 kilometers per hour.  And the speed of a bullet is 2,500 kilometers per hour. LEO and GEO BILL YATES:  Heather, you mentioned LEO.  Tell us what is LEO, and what is GEO? HEATHER COWARDIN:  So LEO is Low Earth Orbit.  GEO is Geosynchronous Earth Orbit.  LEO goes up to about 2,000 kilometers in altitude, and then GEO is about 36,000 kilometers in altitude.  Between there we have this MEO region.  Not the same thing as some of your fantasy novels with Middle Earth, but it’s between LEO and GEO.  It’s kind of where some of our maybe GPS satellites that we rely on every day situate. NICK WALKER:  I’m curious about, you know, what do we do about this?  I mean, it’s out there.  How do we go get it? HEATHER COWARDIN:  Our office, the Orbital Debris Program Office, we’re not in the program of going and getting debris.  We’re more on measuring, assessing, assessing the models, and then mitigating it via policies and standards. Policy Standards ANDY CROWE:  Now, this is great stuff for project managers because people, well, people overlook this quite a bit.  They forget how things like policies and standards can have life-changing impact.  So say more about that.  Tell me how that would come to fruition.  Because it sounds a lot more exciting if you would put some zapper in space and identify the objects and disintegrate them.  But there’s another way to go about this problem.  So I love this. HEATHER COWARDIN:  So we have several standards and requirements that NASA leads and publishes.  One, for example, is the U.S. Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standards Practices.  The four objects within this practice are to, one, control of debris released during normal operations; two, to minimize debris generated by accidental explosions; three, selection of safe flight profile and operational configuration; and four is post-mission disposal of space structures.  So this is at a national political level, and international communities will generally try to follow what we’re presenting. Regulating/Interagency Debris Coordination Committee ANDY CROWE:  So let me ask you a question.  With the international community, how many countries are active in space at this point, would you estimate? HEATHER COWARDIN:  Ooh.  I don’t think I can answer that.  I could tell you how many are participating in the Inter-Agency Debris Coordination Committee. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah? HEATHER COWARDIN:  And that’s 13 members.  So that’s Italy; France; the China National Space Administration; the Canadian Space Agency; the German Aerospace Center; European Space Agency; the Indian Space Research Organization; the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency; Korea; NASA; Roscosmos, that’s Russia; the State Space Agency of Ukraine; and the U.K., UKSA.  So this has an international effect, and we’re all working to try to mitigate the growth and generation of orbital debris. BILL YATES:  Heather, we saw the movie “Gravity,” and we saw the impact of this space junk on Sandra Bullock.  It almost took her out; right?  So we get it.  This is a problem for everyone.  Yet we’ve got the need to have satellites; right?  I need my phone to work.  I need my GPS to work.  So there’s this natural tension.  You must get used to living in that tension of we need more satellites up there, but they need to have a safe space in which to operate. HEATHER COWARDIN:  Right.  And I guess, you know, the thing about “Gravity” that I really liked, among the many things I didn’t like from a physics perspective, was how many students out there had no idea what space debris or orbital debris was.  Probably not a lot.  But as Hollywood and as falsified as this movie was, it got the point.  Everybody now knows the words “space debris,” and now we’re starting to think about it. And now we have students from ages elementary, junior high, to high school that are trying to figure out how do we fix this problem.  Maybe they’re unreasonable, but now we’ve got the entire community starting to think about, okay, this is an issue.  And if I want to be able to have Internet and have my GPS for life of my – everybody’s life, we need to do something about this.  We need to figure out how to regulate this better. Assessing and Mitigation ANDY CROWE:  So regulation, policy, mitigation is one avenue.  Are you aware of any projects to actually remove space junk?  Are there any that are active right now? HEATHER COWARDIN:  The most I can say about that is the Orbital Debris Program Office, we do measurements, modeling, and mitigation.  We don’t do remediation.  Remediation is not something – no single agency or country can solve the debris problem alone.  We work with other countries and international organizations to develop mitigation strategies and standards that reduce the generation of orbital debris, as I mentioned earlier.  But the remediation of the near-Earth space environment will not necessarily involve, not only a multi-agency approach, but an international effort.  And there’s different countries and private companies that are looking into this. ANDY CROWE:  So is most of this currently in a stable orbit?  Or is it in a decaying orbit? HEATHER COWARDIN:  It depends where you are in altitude.  Things in LEO will generally reenter, depending on where they are, within days, months, what have you.  But the higher you go in altitude, the less drag you have, which means things are going to be up there until our great-great-great-great-great-grandkids are born.  So some of these things just cannot come down naturally. NICK WALKER:  It’s just mind-boggling to me that you can identify the sizes of all the space debris, and the types.

Andy Crowe and his wife Karen have recently departed on a sabbatical aboard a 48-ft catamaran, named Gratitude. Hear their story from a project manager’s perspective, focusing on how this undertaking compares to any other project facing a PM.

How effective are your elicitation skills? A good understanding of elicitation can help avoid stakeholder frustration and expensive errors. In this podcast episode, our guest business analyst Jamie Champagne gives advice about the elicitation process.

Nationality, gender, ethnicity, age, and professional and organizational culture can all impact your cultural identity. Jane Canniff shares her experiences in regard to cultural differences across various multicultural work settings.

Listen in to hear a Project Manager who has years of experience in the trenches . Mike Pondiscio talks to us about managing more than one project at a time, resourceful ways to manage change, communicate with stakeholders, and keep a project on track.

Can introverts succeed as project managers? Jennifer Kahnweiler shares how introverts are highly effective leaders, using “superpowers” to effectively lead their teams. Listen in for expert advice about what motivates the introverts on your team.

Andy and Bill tackle your questions in this episode of Manage This. We appreciate your feedback, and we’ve dedicated this episode to your questions. Andy and Bill share their career stories and the relatable challenges they have experienced as PMs.