The Polaris Missile program is recognized as one of the most successful complex projects. How good was the program. The London Daily telegraph wrote the following regarding the UK’s efforts to deploy Polaris in their fleet.

The London Daily Telegraph: "It was no small measure due to him [Levering Smith] that the British Polaris programme was completed on time and on budget—an unprecedented feat in British naval history."

Even more amazing though is after Russia launched Sputnik I into orbit in 1957 there was a call to Admiral Raborn to see if he could improve the schedule of Polaris. After a week he said if they would accept a 1200 mile range instead of 1500 he could get the program operational by 1960, three years ahead of schedule. They accepted of course.

Who does that on a project? How did they do it? This is one of the facts that got me more interested to understand what went on.

The simple answer is they created a fork in the project and they created another project that was scheduled for 1960 and in parallel there was another project following the original plan for 1963 with extended range. This project used a lot of existing technology and components. And they used Agile methodology.

Agile methodology is a type of project management process, mainly used for software development, where demands and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers.

Where was this shown? There is nothing about being Agile written. Here is what they did in 1958.

Sixty-odd test firings of live prototype Polaris missiles were stage between January 1958 and the July 20th shot.
Of these, two were termed outright failures, 20 were rated as partial successes, the remainder complete successes. Even the failures and partial successes were successes in a way, for they revealed flaws which could be corrected or eliminated in future shots.

That is two rocket launches a week. What project schedule and project managers could plan that? It would take weeks just to collect the data to update the schedule and how many meetings would be held for each of those sixty-odd firings.

So even though PERT and project managers were used they do not support how this could be done. No amount of project analysis would shave 3 years off a schedule. I’ll explain more on how this happened in another post. If you are interested in reading what the Navy published in 1960 here is the article. https://quietwarriors.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/all-hands-sep-1960-polaris_a-success-story.pdf