Unintended Side Effects in Complex Systems: Managing Project Risks and Wildfires

Effective project management will try to mitigate risks and prevent them from becoming issues where an issue means that a problem is impacting the project's ability to meet planned commitments. If not successful in preventing the risk from becoming an issue, project management will need to take immediate action to resolve the issue and avoid more impacts. Both of these activities rely on a common, fixed set of project resources for mitigation. This dual challenge is similar in many ways to the decisions faced in other fields to allocate resources between risk prevention and problem suppression such as in wildfire management. For most of the last century, the US Forest Service has focused on fire suppression when wildfires start. Rather than allowing frequent, small fires to burn, fire suppression leads to the accumulation of dead wood and other fuels leading to larger, hotter, and more dangerous fires, often consuming the oldest and largest trees which would have survived smaller fires unharmed. Therefore, wildfire management becomes a balancing between proactive prevention and reactive suppression in a system where physical and political dynamics interact. Important lessons can be learned for NASA project managers from the wildfire management case study. Effective risk management in space projects also balances suppression and prevention activities where an effective process will avoid project “fire-fighting.” Fire-fighting in project management is what happens when teams must fix problems late in the development cycle, and on most NASA projects, this needs to be done within the current resources available. Often successful fire-fighting is rewarded as heroism and is a sought after characteristic for project managers. The rewarding of successful fire-fighting can discourage future prevention activities because it is harder to recognize managers for problems that do not occur and is one of many factors that can contribute to unintended side effects. After exploring the dynamic interactions between components of wildfire management and space systems, we provide insights into improving risk management for NASA projects from our comparative case study method.