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A Hands-On Approach to Workforce Development

September 19th, 2008   By Matt   Filed Under Your Work Space  

I attended the Space 2008 Conference last week in San Diego to present some of our recent work on workforce development (including this blog), and found that the workforce issue was a major topic of discussion.  Lieutenant Governor Garamendi spent a significant portion of his time addressing the audience on this topic, along with others.

Also presenting at Space 2008 on the workforce topic was Richard Rieber, a young engineer at JPL who has been working on a program called Phaeton that struck me as a brilliant meshing of the conflicting requirements that are typically put forth by the incoming workforce and some of the typical needs of management specific to the space community.  The program is centered around providing short term (~3 years) rapid development and prototyping projects that require new hires at JPL to apply their skills to the full cycle of a project, while providing access to their more experienced co-workers.  While the missions under Phaeton are mostly not focused on creating flight hardware, they are intended to provide useful technology development back to JPL, for instance, raising the TRL of a new technology so that it can become eligible for incorporation into future NASA missions.  In the mean time, the participants have developed skills and experience that will benefit their future assignments.

As with most things, the key to effectiveness is in the details.  The projects under Phaeton are conducted in a lab dedicated to these projects.  This allows for the work environment to be set up in a very “Millennial” way.  Reconfigurable common workspaces, combined with a slightly more casual area and an “engineering bullpen”.  Documentation is completed via wiki, and the IT infrastructure is set up to allow for most of the work to be done via laptops.  The engineering workstations and other equipment are clustered together and common to all of the projects.  The overall effect is that space and time are made flexible and team work is enabled through the physical arrangement of the lab and through the collaboration oriented knowledge management setup.

The program is staffed in such a way that about half of the young professionals’ time is dedicated to Phaeton activity, while the rest of their time goes to their “regular” duties.  The mentors are staffed to provide guidance on an as needed basis.  Other experienced engineers contribute to technical oversite and project milestone reviews.

The most interesting aspect of this program to me is the fact that Phaeton was started by young scientists and engineers at JPL.  Rieber and his team are working to bring the program up to full capacity (approximately three concurrent and phase staggered projects).  It will be interesting to see how the program progresses.  I am sure their work will encourage other young talent to follow in their footsteps.

But what does this mean in the context of the space enterprise community?  Could the Phaeton model be the beginning of a trend for the aerospace community?  As space companies, government agencies, and research facilities are required to compete with companies like Google for top engineering talent, will they begin to adopt more and more of their workspace practices?  A trend towards the “Googleization” of the aerospace work environment would be an interesting development.

How many other organizations in the space community are doing something similar with their work environments?  Answer in the comments!

Your Work Space

February 11th, 2008   By _randall   Filed Under Your Work Space  

This is a space for you to divulge anything from quality of life issues to your most embarassing work blunders. In essence, we want to hear about issues like high cost of living, the time a piece of gum slipped out of your mouth nearly breaking a multi-gazillion dollar satellite, the time you asked what those giant reels of tape were for, or simply tell us about how you feel being young and working in the space industry. It’s like myspace with substance!