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poorly designed or administered. Continuing education for mature scientists and engineers should not attempt to repeat or update graduate courses. The mature staff member needs a clear presentation of material he can use on the job, preferably presented by successful professionals within his own organization. The fact that so many outstanding research and technology development organizations with tough-minded managements provide continuing education, often wholly or partly during working hours, indicates a prevailing belief in continuing education as a means of raising the general standard of staff performance.

Finally, we assert that, in principle, simple measures exist for evaluating the aggregate productivity of professional staff and that they need not exclude one another. Productivity can mean the number of publications produced by an individual within the past five years, the frequency with which these publications are cited by the author's colleagues, or the extent to which the staff translated their own or others research into applications (ref. 159). Such measures are essential for planning and budgeting purposes but, even more important, they are the yardsticks by which the laboratory's reasons for being may be judged. And it is surprising, but also encouraging, that productivity does not seem to be clearly related to staff age, age distribution, tenure, or turnover rate. Perhaps it remains only for research administrators in some laboratories to recognize this.

CHAPTER VIII

Supporting Functions and Personnel

Supporting Functions Defined

Whatever the technology development laboratory may be, the last thing we can call it is a one-man show. The presence of a few exceptional individuals may account for the quality of the laboratory's work, but hardly explains how the work gets done. The exceptional scientist or engineer can accomplish little by himself. He needs colleagues with whom to exchange ideas, as well as to serve as collaborators in the working out of those ideas. But even after we subsume all the scientists and engineers at a single installation, there remain several categories of workers without whom the laboratory could not function at all. These perform what are called, for want of something better, "support" functions. There is no really adequate definition of support, but provisionally, we can say that whatever is not included in scientific and engineering work at one end and administration and clerical work at the other is a supporting function.* Support activities include everything from mowing the lawn or carting trash to writing sophisticated computer programs or running a tracking station. The more complex these support functions are, the less distinguishable they are from research and technology development.

But even this way of putting matters scarcely elucidates the significance of support functions for a research installation. Consider any large NASA center. It may have a photographic laboratory or image-processing facility for converting digitized information transmitted by satellite into pictures, storage facilities for holding expensive

* The functions we will discuss are covered by NASA Occupational Codes 100 and 300.

100-Wage System- (Trade and Labor Positions): Includes trade, craft, and general laboring positions (non-supervisory, leader, and supervisory), compensated on the basis of prevailing locality wage rates.

300-Technical Support Positions: Includes scientific and engineering aid, technician, drafting, photography, illustrating, salaried shop superintendents, quality assurance specialist, production planning, and inspecting positions.

one-of-a-kind equipment, tracking or telemetry stations for communicating with satellites designed by its staff, and (almost certainly) a data-processing facility for supporting the center across the board. While all of these facilities "support" the center's mission, we need to go somewhat deeper in order to understand the problems supporting functions pose. There are really three questions we have to consider: Can anything useful be said about functions as diverse as lawn mowing and providing ground support for a deep space probe? How can productivity or efficiency in general support functions be first measured and then evaluated? And what are the public policy implications of the contracting out of many support activities by Federal agencies?

To answer our first question: There are two broad classes of support activities. The first comprises those functions that cannot be managed and controlled as a direct function of the levels of primary technology development tasks of the laboratory. Suppose we call these general support functions (table 7). Included in general support are the personnel office, procurement and supply, financial management, administrative computing, and a number of more specialized staff offices. General support activities are typically organized along functional lines; that is, there exists a single personnel office or procurement office serving the entire installation. General support is also designated "research administration," "base support," and "indirect support."

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The second kind of support can be closely adjusted to the laboratory's primary work. Under this head we include graphics, reproduction, publications services, technical computing, photographic services, and shop services (table 7). It is clear that costs for a part produced in a shop, for example, can be charged to the technology

development activity requiring the part. Thus there is a built-in mechanism for controlling costs that does not exist in the case of general support organizations. We will call this second class of functions direct support. As with general support, direct support is often organized along functional lines; for example, there may be a single comprehensive machine shop or computer organization serving the entire center. Under direct support we would also include those technicians, craftsmen, and engineers assigned to line organizations to work alongside the engineers and scientists in primary technology development. Further, it is common in technology development organizations to locate special purpose shops or support laboratories within a line organization to facilitate direct support of primary research and development such as a special purpose computer installation. Figure 44, with direct support outlined heavily, makes this clear. Note that all direct support units are located in the Directorate of Research Support. But note, also, that direct support personnel "reside" in the technology development directorates (Aeronautics and Flight Systems, Astronautics, Life Sciences) as well.

To return to our first question can anything useful be said about this diversity of functions? - we would reply that all of them can be classified as either general or direct support. A more important (and difficult) question is how we can measure the productivity of general support elements in particular. A related question is, what is the appropriate size (whether numbers of workers or expenditures) of the general support elements? Answers to these questions cannot be based on a laboratory's mission; they must be sought, rather, by considering the specific activities included under each general support function. To take an example to which we shall shortly return — warehousing, the management of a supply depot, may be broken down into broad categories such as housekeeping services, material operations, traffic management, and inventory management, and then further broken down into discrete, measurable activities. In short, we can first consider the appropriate mix of support to professional personnel, before trying to hit on other methods for assessing productivity. And that is precisely what we shall do, using NASA's Ames Research Center as an example.

Measuring Productivity: The Method of Support Ratios

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Support ratios may be defined as the ratios of support personnel to the total center population. These ratios can be calculated at both a gross and at a functional level that is, the ratios of numbers of workers in each support function to the total population. But such ratios mean little unless there are comparative standards to go by. Unfortunately, these do not exist. Each center's special mission will lead it to devise its own approach to the organizing of support activities, which may be reflected

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