Episode 135 – Duty of Care – 737 Max 8 Lessons

When assessing the impacts of tradeoffs, project managers must exercise responsibility in relation to schedule, budget, quality, and compliance decisions. Additionally, one cannot turn a blind eye towards duty of care of the safety of the end user. Dr. Te Wu provides a project management perspective on what factors led to the catastrophic events surrounding the Boeing 737 Max 8 airline tragedies.



Table of Contents



01:33 … The Boeing 737 Max 8 Events05:07 … Initial Investigations07:20 … Factors Leading to the Events10:16 … Prior Complaints12:58 … Technical Complexity and Increased Risk17:37 … Brewing a Perfect Storm20:38 … MCAS Software Issues24:35 … Lessons for the Project Manager27:15 … Intelligent Project Manager vs. Bold Project Manager29:58 … Duty of Care35:07 … Latest on the 737 Max 836:44 … Three Responsibilities for a Project Manager39:15 … Get in Touch with Te39:45 … Closing



TE WU: ... if project managers could think about these three aspects – be realistic, be fact-driven, and be truthful about the data, at least to one’s self and team – and also be a little bit more holistic, we could solve so many problems upfront and head off the downstream challenges.



WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. I’m Wendy Grounds and here in the studio with me is Bill Yates. Today we’re talking with Professor Dr. Te Wu of Montclair State University.  He’s also a visiting professor at China Europe International Business School and the CEO of PMO Advisory.



BILL YATES:  As a certified portfolio, program, project, and risk management professional, Te is a very active volunteer, including serving on PMI’s Portfolio and Risk Management core teams, and he’s a U.S. delegate on the ISO Technical Committee 258 for Project, Program, and Portfolio Management.



WENDY GROUNDS:  Dr. Te Wu is also going to be speaking to us today about the Boeing 737 MAX 8 story.  He has done a lot of research on this project, based on an educational standpoint for project managers.  And he’s taken a lot of lessons from that, that we can learn.  And it’s a very interesting study that he’s done.  So we’re looking forward to digging a little deeper with him today.



Hi, Te.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest today.



TE WU:  It’s a pleasure to be here.  Thank you very much for inviting me.



The Boeing 737 MAX 8 Events



WENDY GROUNDS:  We’re going to jump right in.  And I want to ask if you can give us some details behind the story of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 events which occurred in 2018/2019?



TE WU:  Sure.  Absolutely.  The first incident or tragedy happened with Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610.  That happened October 29th, 2018, and flying a very new Boeing 737 MAX plane.  It was a domestic flight from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang.  And it crashed about 13 minutes after taking off, crashed into the Java Sea, killing all 189 passengers and crew members.  This was the first major accident involving this new series of plane, the Boeing 737 MAX.



And as you could imagine in an accident of this magnitude, it triggers a number of investigations, not only from Boeing, but from the Indonesian Air Authority.  There’s a committee called Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee, KNKT, as well as of course the United States FAA, Federal Aviation Administration.  And at the time Boeing promised full cooperation with the investigation.  But even domestically you could see – I have airline friends, for example, that quite a number of fingers were pointing.  One, it happened on foreign soil.  Two, they were questioned on the rigor of training at Indonesian Lion Air.  And in some ways there were a series of, I would say, cultural mishaps trying to point toward human error than toward the potential problem with the plane.



And Boeing, to be fair, probably did do a good analysis, but perhaps not good enough.  The reason I say that is less than six months later the secon...