Assignment 1: 2010 Project of the Year Award

2010 PMI Project of the Year Award

Citing groundbreaking technical achievement and exemplary management, the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the first laser expected to achieve fusion ignition in a laboratory setting, has been awarded the Project Management Institute's (PMI's) 2010 Project of the Year (Seaver, Lynda L, n.d.). The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA was tasked to build the National Ignition Facility (NIF) by the Department of Energy (DOE). The NIF is a facility to produce intense pressures and temperatures that may, for the first time, simulate in a laboratory the thermonuclear conditions created in nuclear explosions. The NIF project was approved in 1995. Construction
The stadium-sized facility was to be 500,000 square feet. They excavated over 210,000 cubic yards of soil, poured 73,000 cubic yards of concrete, and had more than 7,000 workers completed NIF project three week ahead of schedule and $2M dollars under budget. There were many challenges to overcome. One was the target bay which serves as the target point for 192 lasers had to be installed 45 feet below ground. Concrete had to be poured for 18 hours to overcome this challenge. Another challenge occurred 6 months after the ground breaking when heavy rains from El Nino flooded the NIF worksite. It took wet weather construction engineers 3 weeks to restore the project. Then a month later, crews unearthed the remains of 16,000 year old remains of a mammoth. Construction was halted for 4 days until specialists worked to remove and preserver the skeleton.
Management Issues
By August1999, the project was under severe scrutiny. There were forecasts of massive schedule delays and overruns. The management teams had misidentified the project scope and greatly miscalculated their engineering complexity. This was due to management and inadequate DOE oversight. Troubles started when Lawrence Livermore officials planned, and DOE approved, a NIF budget and a construction cost contingency that were inadequate. The project manager put in charge of NIF had little experience directing large projects and had no control over separately funded laser research and development programs that were essential for NIF’s success which resulted in a poorly integrated management team.
When problems started to appear, there were no actions taken to address them. It was more than 6 months before anything was done. To get the project back on track, the team developed new baseline and schedule. New costs and risk management practices were established. A new senior leadership was put in place, and industrial firms were hired as partners. Working together, the team built the world’s largest and highest energy laser and largest optical instrument. The 192 laser beams were built using 60 miles of mirrors, fiber optics, crystals, and light amplifiers. Each laser fired at a tiny target of hydrogen fuel contained in 130 ton target chamber. When the laser hits, the hydrogen would heat up to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit or about 100 million degrees Celsius.
Challenged with the need to secure enough potassium dihydrogen phosplate crystals large enough to be cut into plates which will convert infrared laser beams into ultraviolet light, the team turned to Moscow State University in Russia. Scientist from the university helped develop a way to grow the crystals in 2 months compared to the 2 years required to do it.
After nearly seven years of testing, the National Nuclear Security Administration approved the facility’s equipment in March 2009. NIF opened 2 months later. Livermore said scientist at the facility set a world record by firing more than one mega jewel of ultraviolet energy into a target the size of a pencil eraser. All objectives were met. That’s about 30 times the amount of energy previously delivered by any laser system. The breakthrough would not have been possible without the coordinated efforts of the NIF project management team. NIF officials called the accomplishment a major milestone that demonstrates the facility’s power and reliability. National Ignition pointed out that the experiment demonstrated the integration of the complex systems required for an ignition campaign. Through the use of skilled and certified project personnel and the rigorous application of the project management standards, processes, and techniques promulgated by the Project Management Institute as embodied in A Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®) Guide —Fourth Edition, the project was completed approximately $2 million under the $3,502 million budget, three weeks ahead of schedule (Hutchinson, D., n.d.).

References
Seaver, Lynda L. (n.d.). National Ignition Facility Wins Prestigious 2010 Project of the Year Award. Retrieved April 27, 2012, from http://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2010/Oct/NIF.html
Hutchinson, Dwight (n.d.). National Ignition Facility (NIF) Winner of Project Management Institute's 2010 Project of The Year Award. Retrieved April 23, 2012, from http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/national-ignition-facility-nif-winner-of-project-management-institutes-2010-project-of-the-year-award-104703104.html