Book Review: The Story of Jodrell Bank, Bernard Lovell (1968)

[major_clanger]

With the recent death of Sir Bernard Lovell I pulled out my copy of The Story of Jodrell Bank, his 1968 account of the very troubled construction of the 250-ft radio telescope that now bears his name. On first reading it I formed the view it should have been subtitled 'How an astronomer learned project management - the hard way' and a re-read only reinforces that view. To get an idea of just how difficult a time Lovell had, here is a selection of the chapter titles:

9 - Land Troubles
12 - The First Financial Crisis
17 - The Crisis of 1954
21 - A quarter of a million pounds in debt
23 - Appeal and inquiry
24 - 1956 and the Site Committee
26 - The Treasury and the Public Accounts Committee
31 - The search for a financial solution
33 - The final appeal

As a former project manager and now lawyer with a long-standing interest in radio astronomy (a late friend operated a 30' radio telescope in his field) I find Lovell's account absolutely fascinating. In the late 1946 Lovell - still in his early 30s and fresh from war work on radar - had returned to Manchester to work on cosmic ray research, but had quickly become more interested in the wider astronomical possibilities of studying the noise his modified radar sets detected. Working at the university's botanical research facility at Jodrell Bank, far away from electrical interference, he first built a large zenith-pointing fixed parabolic antenna, and the results from this were so promising that he decided a fully-steerable version would be worth building.

Now it's worth noting that at the time there were hardly any large radio telescopes of the steerable-dish variety at all. What Lovell was proposing was no mere scaling-up of existing technology; rather, it was as if the designers of the first steam gunboats had decided that their next project would be HMS Dreadnought.* Lovell's reasoning was that at the wavelengths at which most radio astronomy was being done a smaller steerable telescope would be of little use; its sensitivity and resolution would be too poor. This of course meant that Lovell and his consulting engineer Charles Husband were taking a leap into the unknown.

I can say without doubt that one word project managers don't like to hear is 'unknown'. Other unwelcome words include 'novel', 'experimental' and 'unprecedented'. There are two main problems with trying to do something very new: it is hard to know how long it will take, given that unforeseen problems are almost inevitable, and it is even harder to estimate how much it will cost, in that cost models are almost always based on prior experience.

With hindsight (and Lovell himself readily admitted this) it is easy to see that the route Lovell and Husband took was doomed to run into problems. In effect, Lovell said what he wanted, Husband did a rough design, Lovell agreed it in principle and they went ahead with building it, expecting to address and fix problems as they encountered them. This is a risky enough project management approach as it is, because unless you set very clear stages and mileposts it is easy to lose control of schedule and budget. However, where problems really set in was when the telescope fell victim to what project managers call 'requirement creep'. This is a deadly disease of projects that manifests itself as what I used to call WIBNI syndrome: Wouldn't It Be Nice If it did X as well...?

With the 250-foot telescope, the requirement change was a shift downwards in working wavelength to the 20 cm range. Two factors drove this. The first was that advances in radio astronomy had uncovered 21 cm hydrogen line emission, and it became clear in the early 1950s that this would be an central field of radio astronomy research. Secondly, Lovell was in contact with what he obliquely terms 'other Ministries' about possible applications of the telescope, and it is clear that he is referring to the various defence and security ministries and applications such as missile-tracking and SIGINT. As a result Lovell revised the design of the dish's reflecting surface from having a coarse 2-inch mesh to first a finer mesh and then a metal membrane. This added weight and changed the aerodynamic properties of the antenna, further adding weight as the structural ramifications propagated through the design. As the cost rose - in large part, to be fair, because of the rising cost of steel - these changes were seized upon by funding bodies and eventually the Treasury as seeming evidence of mismanagement. Remarkably, Lovell seems to have gone a long way towards satisfying defence interests without getting firm assurance first that any resulting cost increases would be funded; indeed, it seems that he sought to avoid any direct funding links that might highlight what were at the time very sensitive topics.

Lovell's management style also didn't always help him. There is a fine line between being a hands-on, at-the-coal-face engaged manager and being an outright micromanager, and Lovell may have erred towards the latter. It certainly seems that he felt obliged to involve himself in every issue affecting the telescope, to the extent that even before construction started he had become deeply embroiled in a High Court dispute over the disposition of farmland needed for the telescope site. Later on he was to entangle himself in town planning arguments as he sought to prevent inroads of development into the radio-quiet zone around Jodrell. While Lovell doubtless had to have an input into all these matters, one reads some of the correspondence with university administration, financial and legal staff with the feeling that there was a lot of placating and cleaning up going on in his wake. Having said that, Lovell had excellent relations with many key supporters of the university and it's clear that absent his tireless lobbying the whole project would have ground to a halt.

In the end the arrival of the Space Race saved the 250-foot telescope from financial disaster and Lovell from ruin; he recounts a meeting in early 1958 with the Chairman of the University Council at which he was told, apparently in the nicest possible way, that he was in grave risk of imprisonment. Fortunately the US requirement for deep space tracking made cancellation an impossibility, and as the telescope's fame grew the science funding bodies and Treasury took a more sanguine view. Finally, Lord Nuffield bailed out the final £50,000 (some £900,000 in today's money), which is why Jodrell Bank was the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratory for many years.

There are certainly lessons to be learned from Lovell's book for anyone working in project management or even just interested in the management of major projects. The need for clear requirement analysis, proper change control and above all ongoing assessment and monitoring of risks are all points that emerge from the tribulations of building Jodrell Bank. Mind you, I have a sneaking feeling that if the telescope project had been run to best PRINCE 2 practices the inevitable cost and schedule overruns would probably have resulting in any sane project board pulling the plug. Perhaps Lovell's inexperience and at times naivety got the project through; if he'd told the people who ought to have been told the things he ought to have told them, he would have been in trouble long before the telescope was complete enough to prove itself. But the cost must have been awful for him. Although he lived to 98, there is a picture of Lovell in 1960, when he would have been 46, showing a visitor around the telescope. He looks as if he is about 65.

The Story of Jodrell Bank is long out of print, which is a great shame as it's an excellent book for anyone wanting an inside view of what it's like to try to do the impossible and - barely - succeed. It also gives a fascinating insight into university administration in the 1950s, when Vice-Chancellors turned up in Rolls-Royces for visits and crucial policy decisions were made when Permanent Secretaries bumped into captains of industry at their London club.

*My warship analogy is not as tenuous as it seems; the elevation drive of the 250-ft telescope was built around 27-ft diameter rack and pinion rings from the 15-inch gun turrets of the battleships Revenge and Royal Sovereign.

Comments

[watervole]

FAscinating. My dad used to lecture at Manchester University, and he took us round Jodrell BAnk when we were little, before it became a big public attraction. One of several things that sparked my interest in space and science.

[non-trivial.livejournal.com]

That sounds fascinating; does he mention how they got hold of the battleship parts?

Jon Agar, formerly of Manchester and now at UCL did a lot of work on Jodrell Bank (I think it may have been his PhD topic); have you read any of his work? I'm thinking particularly of 'Science and Spectacle:
The Work of Jodrell Bank in Postwar British Culture'; a book which I really should get round to reading...

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

P M S Blackett suggested very early on that naval gunnery involved some of the same problems of accurate movement of heavy equipment, and this lead to Lovell and Husband visiting gunnery establishments and later Husband buying the turret racks from battleships as they were scrapped. Apparently the parts in question sat around for several years before the telescope was complete enough to put them into place.

[waistcoatmark.livejournal.com]

If you want a real PM horror story, try reading "Dreaming in Code". As a programmer it gave me nightmares: all of the individual decisions seem the sort of reasonable thing we do every day, but the end result...

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

I remember reading that book when it first came out. Got it from the local library. Seem to recall one of the illustrations was a cartoon from a paper in the fifties showing Lovell with a miniature of his telescope in front of him as a begging bowl.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Yes, with three schoolboys in the headgear of the three armed services running past, each with a handful of fireworks all labelled "£10 Million" - a comment on the cost overruns of defence projects of the time that dwarfed the debt of Jodrell Bank.