NASA's Problem Solving

From the Post and Courier 7/30/05
"NASA Chief Takes Blame for Foam Loss"
First two paragraphs:
NASA's boss took responsibility Friday for the alarming loss of a big piece of fuel-tank insulation from Discovery and refused to give up on flying another space shuttle later this year.
Administrator Michael Griffin said a new "tiger team" of engineers will seek solutions to the problem that brought down Columbia and continues to haunt the space agency. "By being smart and working hard," NASA might be able to launch another shuttle by year's end, he said.

OK. Let's look at what he is saying. First, let's recap what has happened. Two shuttle launches have resulted in the deaths of all passengers. The last one is still fresh on our minds. This week's launch experienced a defect very similar to the supposed root cause of the last fatal launch. So, what is wrong with NASA's problem solving process?

The text highlighted in red deserves comment:
The boss took responsibility. So what? Of course he is responsible. His quality system is failing. It is broken. From a laymen's perspective, NASA has a broken problem solving process. He owes us more explanation as to why this happened again and more importantly, what his management staff is doing to fix the quality system.

What is a tiger team of engineers? Sounds to me that this is meant to make the public feel better. Maybe I'm too cynical but what problem solving process will this team use? The same one as before or has NASA performed a lessons learned to see what needs to be done differently?

Being smart and working hard are certainly vital to the success of projects but this is not enough. You can hold a PhD from MIT and work 24 hours a day but if you work in a crappy system, the results will never meet expectations.

Guys, in my opinion, this is simple "Deming Stuff". NASA needs to take a long hard look at its quality system before launching any more shuttles. The next article I read hopefully will be their list of improvements to such system.

Send Michael Griffin an email if you agree with me. As engineers, we have a responsibility to comment on this.