Deviating from a well-organized plan can exact a heavy price

摘要

We working at Sandia National Labs, I was tasked to manage the development of an extremely critical test item. This item was to become the central portion of a quality assurance system for a fusing component required by a strategic weapon program. Our corporate partner was Bendix Kansas City (now Honeywell). Bendix staff assumed many associated system responsibilities. The aforementioned test item was a precision centrifuge needed to provide quantifiable accelerations to accuracy requirements never before achieved. At the programmatic level, the performance requirements assigned to the centrifuge had previously been evaluated. This evaluation identified the centrifuge as the single item most likely to delay or void the weapon program.