Technology Today issue 1 2008 - Raytheon

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LEADERS CORNER Continued from page 21 says, “I’ve got to meet this deadline,” and doesn’t follow a rule, to me, that has introduced an unnecessary risk. The schedule has taken precedence over delivering a good, sound product. So in such a case you start with a quality problem and it just snowballs. Often, because of cutting corners, the product isn’t quite right, and then you have to rework it. Costs start going up. Delays happen. So in this example, the programmer tried to get it out the door quickly by cutting corners at the risk of quality and risked an unhappy customer. Leaders and managers need to hold people accountable for knowingly breaking a rule or not doing the right things. If they don’t, others will see that poor behavior is tolerated, and a normalization of deviance will exist throughout the community. TT: How do you eliminate normalizations of deviance and organizational risks? GA: It starts with core values, and how well they are embraced. Raytheon is fortunate to have wonderful core values. They are fundamentally what we need for Mission Assurance. It begins by treating people with dignity and respect, and taking care of their needs. Integrity is also key. If we don’t have that we don’t have anything. Of course, no organization is perfect because they are made up of us, people. People are fallible. It’s the human factor. You can’t change that. You can only change the conditions in which we work. That's what organizational assurance is all about: people — human factors — and a healthy organization that demonstrates top performance. Typically, avoiding normalizations of deviance is as simple as practicing core values and holding others accountable to them. It is focusing on organizational health, and identifying what’s tolerated by leadership. It starts with the individual. If your job is to torque a bolt and you over torque it, and your supervisor knows that you’ve done it three times that day, you might think: “I'm not going to tell anybody.” The part may fail when the customer uses the product. That person has to know that he or she needs to speak up, always. My motto is never walk past a problem. 22 2008 ISSUE 1 RAYTHEON TECHNOLOGY TODAY This is the next level of Mission Assurance — making sure the organization is healthy. Leadership is responsible for making sure that the organization works. If the organization is healthy, the processes will be shaped, focused, agreed upon and will work to make quality products. If the organization is not healthy — that is, has undue organizational risks — processes may not work, and this may lead to mission failure. A healthy organization has positive dynamics like strong teamwork and communication, and good leadership. It has the discipline to follow the good standards that have been set. TT: So what actions can you take or tools can you use to improve organizational assurance? GA: There are three tools we are looking to develop in partnership with the businesses. One will be about mission risk assessment or organizational risk assessment, and is called an organizational assurance assessment. It’s where a psychologist leads a team through a series of careful processes and methodologies to find breakdowns within an organization that are leading to mission failure. He or she will take a week to go in and dig down into an organization, conduct interviews and do the analysis. Follow-on normally takes about two weeks. It’s a little intrusive, but it works and the process has been adopted by some of our customers. The second tool is a risk assessment and mitigation process — or RAMP tool. It identifies hazards in any aspect of an organization. It then breaks out associated risks and quantifies them, and rank orders them. It can answer questions like, what’s the biggest risk to your organization? And then it quantifies the risk mitigation. So we can tell a business leader that “17 percent of all your risk is this, or that, 6 percent is in this or that area, etc.” and here's the mitigation strategy — quantified of course. It can tell a leader the best mitigation strategies he or she can implement with considerations of cost, time, mission impact, organizational impact and available technology. We can tell leaders that if they apply a particular mitigation strategy, they will reduce their risk by such and such percent. And if they do “x” strategy, it will also have a positive effect on “y” and “z” hazards, so they get Q&A With Greg Alston more bang for the buck, and the strategy is quantified by percentage of possible overall risk reduction. The third tool is what we’re going to call RMAT — Raytheon Mission Assurance Tool. It’s a very non-intrusive tool, a 15-minute online survey. The theory here is to canvass all of Raytheon. It will point out which organizations have a problem in different areas where Mission Assurance may be affected, and will red-flag them. It’ll be a quick and easy way for us to identify where there’s a problem, and we can address our time and resources on that precise area. We still need to develop the exact questions, and we will be tapping people from all the businesses to help craft them. TT: How else are you partnering with the businesses? GA: Again, one of our focus areas for 2008 is to better integrate Mission Assurance across the enterprise. However, our businesses are all unique and have different needs. We have organizations that focus on a range of products and systems, like software, hardware, radar and missiles. All these different organizations have different requirements, different processes. So tailored Mission Assurance for each business is going to be important. There can’t be a one-size-fits-all Mission Assurance. This year we are looking at what we already do at Raytheon to build good teamwork, develop leaders, assess our organizations, etc. We will look at new tools we can bring into play, and at ensuring we don’t duplicate anything. We will look at what processes are good, which ones aren’t, and which need to be modified. These assessments and determinations are probably different for each business. In general, the businesses have built a strong process-focused foundation for Mission Assurance. However, the process alone cannot deliver the product. As I’ve said, it takes a good, healthy organization. We may end up with a tailored approach to Mission Assurance at Raytheon, but there are some fundamental things that we can all embrace that are standard.
Certain processes are sacred and must be followed. We all really need to strive for organizational health. We need to make sure to embrace our core values. We need to keep an eye out for normalizations of deviance. The tools we are developing will give the businesses the critical means to look into their organizations to monitor these things. TT: Will you be forming a Mission Assurance Council with the businesses? GA: For now, we’ve started by creating a Raytheon Mission Assurance Action Group or RMAAG. I’ve engaged the businesses and they’ve embraced it. The RMAAG includes Mission Assurance people from the businesses in a forum that allows us to get together and talk about the issues. We can look for things we can share that some businesses are already doing, and that others are not doing, but should be. We can talk things over and get some clarity on just how different each one should be, and understand what the commonalities are, share best practices, and maybe get rid of processes we don’t need. We can work as a group. That would be a prelude to a possible Mission Assurance Council. TT: You joined Raytheon from the customer community. How would you rate us at Mission Assurance compared to our peers? GA: I think that we do Mission Assurance very well. I see us as world class. However, I see our competitors doing well in this area, too. My goal is to be a world apart, and leave those guys behind. TT: You’ve been a warfighter. What does Raytheon’s commitment to Mission Assurance mean to you personally? GA: “No doubt” is important to me. My son-in-law is an F-22 pilot. Whatever we put on his airplane is important to my daughter and my grandkids. At the end of the day it’s really about two things: winning the engagement, and assuring the lives of our warfighters. Imagine being a warfighter in the fray. There is already high risk all around him or her. The last thing he or she needs to think or worry about is whether or not the equipment is going to work the way we, Raytheon, promised. It’s got to work, all the time. Supporting Math and Science Education When you help a student master the Pythagorean theorem, you could be supporting a future engineer who will master nanotechnology. That’s why Raytheon created MathMovesUTM , a national initiative designed to show middle school students that they can master math, and that it will take them to lots of cool places. Raytheon is also proud to support MATHCOUNTS ® , which motivates more than 500,000 middle school students to sharpen their math skills each year. By working to improve our children’s proficiency in math and science today, we’re giving them what they need to improve our world tomorrow. www.MathMovesU.com © 2008 Raytheon Company. All rights reserved. “Customer Success Is Our Mission” is a registered trademark of Raytheon Company. MathMovesU is a trademark of Raytheon Company. MATHCOUNTS is a registered trademark of the MATHCOUNTS Foundation. RAYTHEON TECHNOLOGY TODAY 2008 ISSUE 1 23
Page 1 and 2: Technology Today HIGHLIGHTING RAYTH
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Page 11 and 12: Near-term Raytheon applications of
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Page 37 and 38: PHM Conceptual Overview Prognostics
Page 39 and 40: International Patents Issued to Ray

Technology Today issue 1 2008 - Raytheon

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