Posts
How do I know it’s summer in Indiana? Usually, it’s when I’m a) checking the corn
fields against the old “knee high by the Fourth of July” aphorism; b) checking
the forecast for thunderstorms and/or temperatures over 90 degrees; c) driving
to Jasper for the Grissom Scholarship Golf Tournament and Awards Banquet. This year was no exception on any of these,
although there was an important difference: on the day before the tournament, I
was already in southern Indiana, attending a weeklong vacation for a subset of
car geeks: the 60th Porsche Parade in French Lick and West Baden Springs.
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| Barrett’s 1989 944S2 at West Baden Springs for Porsche Parade 2015 |
Great! I already have
my clubs! I’m only 25 miles away! I’m
driving my classic German-engineered toy!
What am I going to
talk about?
Fortunately, I’m among friends at the Sultan’s Run golf course: people who laugh at my jokes, people who have seen my golf game improve
(ahem!), and people who are eager and excited to hear about new projects and
new updates in my work with NASA. I’m
also excited to reconnect with “new old friends,” some retired engineers from
McDonnell Corporation who helped to design and build Project Mercury. I admire these engineers (and their wives)
for their commitment, honesty, passion, and their unique legacy. I look at them, smile as they greet me and
shake my hand, and an idea comes to mind.
Tonight’s talk isn’t about big rockets, or shiny mission
control centers, or stunning new pictures of far-away galaxies. I love all of those things, but in the
elements of my current research projects in healthcare information
coordination, and weather information technology for general aviation, and
teams conducting planetary analog research, there is a theme that could be
easily missed. Details matter.
At the Porsche Parade, one of the Porsche engineers talked
about the weeks and months of effort associated with the color of a special
edition of their signature car. How
do we match the color to the iconic reference of Porsche in the USA? What color is it? How do we manage the logistics with our suppliers? What do we call it? All this for a shade of blue? (Actually, it’s called Club Blau, danke.)
And we’re only making 60 cars?
(60th Porsche Parade, 60th year of the car club …
you get it?) Well, this is for a company
that is taking pride in the cars that have driven from all over the US
(including Alaska), and have a rich racing history, and celebrations of
vehicles with over 500,000 miles on the odometer, or the same owner after 50 or
60 years. The process of selecting Club
Blau is part of an important signal: Details Matter when you want excellent,
iconic, legendary engineering.
There are a few pharmacists in the audience, so I’m pleased
to talk about our work with medication delivery safety. If you’re in the world of getting the right
dose of the right drug to the right patient at the right time (that’s four of
the six “rights”), 99% isn’t even close to good enough. In 2014, there were 4.2 Billion prescriptions
filled in the US—90.15 million in Indiana alone. If Indiana pharmacists were only 99% correct,
there would still be over 901,000 people getting something wrong in their
prescriptions. To get this down to under
10 people, we’d need “seven nines” accuracy: systems of people, and technology,
and information making an error less than one in ten million. You don’t get there with casual integration
or poor thinking or blame after the fact.
You get there with a relentless focus on details and systems integration
and always thinking, “How can we make this better?”
Astronaut Scott Kelly is on board the International Space
Station for a year. That’s a long
time. And yet, that’s not even a third
of a planned mission to Mars. How do we
get astronauts to work together with robots, and science investigators, and
mission control engineers, to do excellent science and keep everyone alive and not
waste valuable time, expertise, or access to unique veins of knowledge on
another planet, moon or asteroid? My
project work in Idaho, and now in Hawaii, looks at how to improve the quality
and effectiveness of communication to ensure the right details get to where
they need to be, and that knowledge and information are exchanged well, even
with 20 minute communication delays.
I admit, all of that sounds a long way off for a 17 year old
student who just graduated from high school.
That’s for old folks, not for me, right? To paraphrase an often-seen reference, Objects in the future are closer than they
appear. Yes, the “Old Mac Team” engineers are senior and
retired now, but how old were they
when they were moving to Cape Canaveral, or flying to meet with a contractor with a stuck
gyro on their lap? They were in their
mid- to late-20s, at most 10 years older than this year’s Grissom Scholarship
winners. Perhaps an even closer example
was dedicated this past April, and exists right now on the Purdue campus. With some prodding from me, the smartphones
came out, and people began to view images of the VOSS model of the solar system near the
corner of Martin Jischke Dr. and Nimitz Dr. on the West Lafayette campus.
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| VOSS EPICS students prepare for dedication and open house, April 18, 2015 |
That’s an impressive and iconic landscape feature. I fully expect that, in just a few years, it
will be common to hear people say, “Let’s meet at the Sun.” But what is most impressive and memorable
about this effort is that it started as a student project, led by a young woman
who took on a major leadership role in the VOSS project as a sophomore for an
EPICS team in 2010. Getting VOSS from
an idea to a landscape icon and sculpture on campus is not a single task; it’s
a long and complex series of lots of little tasks. It’s not just which artist to pick for the
design, or how big to make the sun. It
also involves how big the bolts need to be, and what pieces need to be in the
planet plaza to represent a star chart for Janice Voss’ birth, or having the
sculptures be deemed suitable for a campus safety audit.
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| Barrett with VOSS artist, Jeff Laramore |
In a
tribute to James McDonnell, his son John noted, “he did everything in life
with meticulous attention to detail, to the point that it could be
excruciatingly, maddeningly exasperating to those around him; but he also
inspired those same people with a sense of important mission and high purpose.”
In order to do wonderful, amazing,
transforming, legendary things…
Details do matter.
