I worked at NASA JSC for three years in the ISS cargo division; although I never interacted with the JPL teams, I did coordinate with a ton of people across SpaceX, Northop-Grumman, JAXA, ESA, Boeing, etc.
I simply cannot explain the level of organizational dysfunction in that institution. In many cases there were thoughtful and talented people in the job roles, but there were many blinding, glaring failures of basic information storage and availability across the entire org. My favorite example is having a hard time finding all of the requested cargo transactions for resupply flights in the cargo database because the "desired flight" field was a free-text entry instead of a drop-down menu connected to a central list of NASA flight title strings. I hammered on that issue for fifteen months straight and got absolutely nowhere with it, and I had a list of similar issues about seventy items long. If all of my issues had been addressed we probably could have reduced the number of people in the loop in cargo logistics by half.
The article is talking about leadership "walking the floor"--we had something similar happen, where I couldn't convince any of the major ISS divisions to fix their cargo data so we didn't have to interact face-to-face, but their higher-ups would call and email me to double check the status of a cargo request. They were "walking the floor" and "staying in touch", but only because they wouldn't (or couldn't) adopt any policies to make a streamlined system work. I don't know if the same thing is happening at JPL, but I have to assume that it is, given the pathological nature of the repeated communication failures I saw.
A well-organized institution should be able to provide clear visibility into their data and projects just through smart organization of their digital assets. If they don't have that basic competence, then they would be extra screwed by remote work.
I simply cannot explain the level of organizational dysfunction in that institution. In many cases there were thoughtful and talented people in the job roles, but there were many blinding, glaring failures of basic information storage and availability across the entire org. My favorite example is having a hard time finding all of the requested cargo transactions for resupply flights in the cargo database because the "desired flight" field was a free-text entry instead of a drop-down menu connected to a central list of NASA flight title strings. I hammered on that issue for fifteen months straight and got absolutely nowhere with it, and I had a list of similar issues about seventy items long. If all of my issues had been addressed we probably could have reduced the number of people in the loop in cargo logistics by half.
The article is talking about leadership "walking the floor"--we had something similar happen, where I couldn't convince any of the major ISS divisions to fix their cargo data so we didn't have to interact face-to-face, but their higher-ups would call and email me to double check the status of a cargo request. They were "walking the floor" and "staying in touch", but only because they wouldn't (or couldn't) adopt any policies to make a streamlined system work. I don't know if the same thing is happening at JPL, but I have to assume that it is, given the pathological nature of the repeated communication failures I saw.
A well-organized institution should be able to provide clear visibility into their data and projects just through smart organization of their digital assets. If they don't have that basic competence, then they would be extra screwed by remote work.