The Ascent of Everest – Risk Mitigation

The vertical scale problem necessitated the following mitigations:

• Reduce the amount of time spent in the death zone to the minimum essential for success. This is why Advance Base was established at the foot of the Lhotse Face, below the death zone; the final Assault teams set off from here and marched near-continuously to conquer the summit. While there was an Assault Camp on the South Col (in the death zone), that was never planned for long-term stay. That was more like a supply dump and transit camp for overnight stays (though Hillary and Tenzing were held up here longer due to inclement weather).
• Acclimatization. A full three weeks were were built into the plan to climb minor eminences in the Khumbu area to get the climbers use to the rarefied conditions.
• Use of bottled oxygen. Significant research went into perfecting bottled oxygen equipment with a view to making them lighter and more portable. While a new technology called closed-circuit promised lesser weight, it was unproven. Hence, John Hunt decided to use both closed-circuit and the proven but heavier open-circuit (Hillary and Tenzing succeeded using the open-circuit equipment). [In a sense, the use of two types of oxygen equipment was also a risk mitigation - mitigating against the risk of the failure of any one type of oxygen equipment - which paid rich dividends. But this is not how John Hunt thought about it.]
• Lifting supplies as high as possible on the mountain, so that the assault parties can have more resources at their command thus increasing their chance of success.

This last point needs elaboration. Here is John Hunt once again:

Lifting supplies up the Lhotse Face

Among much good advice, I was to remember particularly Norton’s words: “The whole history of Himalayan climbing seems to me to emphasise [the fact] that attempts have always been made from too low an assault camp…the finalists [have been] defeated by attempting too long a climb on the last day…put your assault camp on, or very close under the Southern Summit. Assuming considerable step cutting will be necessary beyond the Southern Summit I shall never have any great hope of success unless a final camp is so placed.” These words, reinforced by Longstaff’s recommendation to me to make this final camp my very special responsibility, remained very much in my thoughts until the day when it had been achieved.

And when John Hunt makes something his “very special responsibility”, he puts his heart and soul into it. To lift this last camp as high as possible, he cast himself in a supporting role in the assault, and carried supplies up to 27,500 ft, a little higher than Lambert and Tenzing had reached the previous year!

Here is how John Hunt approached the risk posed by the climatic conditions:

The cure is worse than the disease

There is no end to the Theater of the Absurd in our neighbourhood.

First, a rag-tag bunch of gun-toting Afghan goondas move into Pakistan and take over the Swat valley, just like that. The 500,000 million strong Pak army with all its fancy hardware does nothing to stop them.

Now, for some unknown reason, they want to send the Talibs packing and how do they do it? Bomb the hell out of Swat, civilians be damned. It is reported that 2.5 million people have been displaed due to this shelling.

The tent cities are growing in the district of Swabi, in north-west Pakistan: swelled with the thousands fleeing the fighting in nearby Buner district…

Most displaced people say they have left their homes not because of the Taleban’s excesses, but because of shelling by the army.

“The Taleban captured our area and started patrolling the streets, they snatched vehicles from NGO staff, government officials and private individuals, and they threatened local people,” says Nasir Ali, a high school student.

“But it wasn’t as bad as the shelling by the army – that was what actually forced us to leave our homes.”

- Cynicism among Pakistani refugees

This creates a humanitarian crisis which needs, surprise surprise, a few billion dollars to fix and the international community is expected to pony up.

Hindi – Brazili Bhai Bhai

Most of us know how poor science (and engineering) education is in our country. Well, we are not alone. Our BRIC companion Brazil too seems to be in the same mess as we are.

In a highly illuminating section of the captivating book Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!, Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman brilliantly narrates the key difference between our rote learning and the American / European way of learning by understanding and applying what you have learnt: 

In regard to education in Brazil…I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question — the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell — they couldn’t answer it at all!…

After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students
had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant.

Later I attended a lecture at the engineering school. The lecture went like this, translated into English: “Two bodies… are considered equivalent… if equal torques… will produce… equal acceleration. Two bodies, are considered equivalent, if equal torques, will produce equal acceleration.” The students were all sitting there taking dictation, and when the professor repeated the sentence, they checked it to make sure they wrote it down all right. Then they wrote down the next sentence, and on and on. I was the only one who knew the professor was talking about objects with the same moment of inertia, and it was hard to figure out.

I didn’t see how they were going to learn anything from that. Here he was talking about moments of inertia, but there was no discussion about how hard it is to push a door open when you put heavy weights on the outside, compared to when you put them near the hinge — nothing!

After the lecture, I talked to a student: “You take all those notes – what do you do with them?”

“Oh, we study them,” he says. “We’ll have an exam.”

“What will the exam be like?”

“Very easy. I can tell you now one of the questions.” He looks at his notebook and says, ” ‘When are two bodies equivalent?’ And the answer is, ‘Two bodies are considered equivalent if equal torques will produce equal acceleration.’ ” So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and “learn” all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.

He also presents a very practical illustration of this phenomenon:

The Ascent of Everest – Risk Assessment

Having taken a look at the level of detail which went into the project plan, should we now move on to the overall project phases and time-lines? Not yet. It would be more appropriate to follow John Hunt’s though process as he worked his way toward decisions on project phases and schedules.

John Hunt basically took a risk-based approach to project planning. (Note that this is the same risk-driven approach that the Rational Unified Process also recommends except that RUP ties risk management very closely with iterative execution, whereas, for obvious reasons, John Hunt did not ever consider an iterative approach).

Here are the three major risks that Col. Hunt identified:

There are three factors of awe-inspiring magnitude facing those who seek adventure among the highest peaks. They are this matter of vertical sacle, the climatic conditions and the climbing difficulties.

Vertical scale refers to the problem of the dramatic deterioration of the human body (including the brain) at altitudes of over 25,000 ft due to lack of oxygen.  To understand this effect, it is sufficient to note that the simple act of tying ones shoe laces can take upward of an hour. Melting snow and making tea typically takes two hours. In effect, the human body literaly starts dying (cells are dying and you are loosing weight at an alarming rate). Digestion comes to a grinding halt and most climbers do not and cannot eat anything (all required nutrition being provided by the sugar in the tea). No wonder these altitudes are called the death zone.

Climatic conditions refers not just to the bitter cold and howling winds. While these have to be faced and surmounted, John Hunt was more concerned with the two climbing windows that the Everest offers: one in spring, before the onset of the south-west monsoon  - May-Jun timeframe – and the other after the monsoon wears away and before winter sets in – in Oct. These are akin to the production windows that software project managers are familiar with. This is also analogous to the infamous time-to-market requirements that software project managers dread.

Climbing difficulties refers to the mountaineering challenges that the Everest poses. Though Alpine peaks are known to pose more severe climbing challenges, the Everest was not without its set of challenges. The chief among these were the Khumbu Icefall,  the Lhotse Face and, as Hillary discovered at the very end, the Hillary’s Step on the final, as yet unseen, Summit Ridge.

Having identified these risks, John Hunt then proceeded to drill down to the next level of detail and determine actions that he needs to take, in his project plan, to tackle these risks head on. Let us look at each of these risks and their mitigations in greater detail in subsequent posts.

As you read through this and the next post, it will strike you as natural and obvious that anyone climbing the Everest should consider and mitigate these risks.

Elementary my dear Watson.

- Sherlock Holmes

Yet, in software circles, specifically among Agile Methodists, risk assessment and mitigation is considered profound wisdom!

End of the Global Crisis

The worst crisis to hit global economy since the Great Depression is over before it even really got started. LIBOR posts biggest 2-day drop in four months as US banks scramble to repay bail-out cash.

“The tension has disappeared and we are gradually normalizing,” said Patrick Jacq, a senior fixed-income strategist in Paris at BNP Paribas SA, the biggest French lender. “There’s less stress in the market and banks know they will get liquidity.”

And we in India also saw the FII’s back in action with a madcap movement of the Sensex on Monday. The Americans are back with their usual excesses

Apart from the trillions pumped by various governments, one key element of the solution seems to have been the squeeze on the bonus of all the TARP recipients! A firm rap on the knuckle and these bankers fixed the worst crisis to hit the golbal economy since the Great Depression!

What happens now to all that talk about a New World Order, I wonder?

And does Going Green still matter? I guess not, not any longer.

Vacation Journal

Remember the school essay your fifth grade teacher made your write – "How I spent my summer holidays"?
 
In these modern times, when Google is king, I tried writing the same essay using Google Maps: My self-drive vacation in Scotland
 
Go ahead. Be the judge. Do I get pass marks?
 

My Travails with a Digital Camera

About a year back, I switched from a 20 years old Nikon 4004 to a Nikon D80 digital camera. Since then, I have been struggling with this new camera with very poor results and I thing I finally got a hang of this camera only now, after a full year of struggles.

For those of you who are interested in equipment, here are the details of my experience.

From the start, the D80 showed four significant problems which I had never seen with my film camera:

1. Significant over-exposure on all snaps irrespective of exposure metering mode. This means colors are unsaturated; there is a haze on all prints.
2. Significant light drop off on the corners of the frame. I subsequently found out that this is called “vignette”, something I had never been bothered with on my film camera.
3. Image softness on the 135mm focal length (I use a 18 – 135mm Nikkor lens). Partly because of design compromises and party because there is no vibration reduction on my lens (when you view a digital photograph on a monitor, even the slightest softness is very visible – i.e. digital photography is very unforgiving on camera or subject shake – Why IS and VR Matter).
4. The built-in flash is a piece of junk. It hardly ever does fill-flash well. When it acts as the main source of light, it produces garish flash photos with harsh highlight on subject’s cheeks and foreheads.

Solutions:

1. I now use exposure compensation extensively, -0.3EV or -0.7 EV on almost all shots. Basically I bracket on metered exposure and these two lower EVs. This means I take each snap thrice, draining the battery more (not to mention the subjects getting annoyed).
2. I used to shoot in aperture priority mode with shutter wide open at f/4-5.6. Now I have switched to f/8 or f/11. This reduces vignette. Thanks to Thom Hogan and Ken Rockwell lens reviews for this tip.
3. I kept aside my 28-135mm lens and bought myself a 18-55mm Nikkor lens. There is significantly less loss of sharpness (even at f/11). This lens covers a smaller focal length range and hence has fewer design compromises. There is still some softness at shutter speed of 1/60s due to the lack of VR, hence I am going to shoot at higher shutter speeds with this lens.
4. I bought myself a SB400, a nifty flash whose flash head can be tilted for bounce flash, eliminating harsh highlights. A 60 degree bounce eliminates harsh highlights with some loss of illumination on the lower part of the frame.

Am I happy that I have found solutions to my problems? Not exactly. Though my hobby seems to be back on track, you see this digital camera makes me do more work (to get the same results) than my old film camera did. And it has gotten more expensive.

1. The exposure metering on N4004 never overexposed this much. I could blindly trust the metering and concentrate on composition. Not with the D80. Both 3D Matrix metering and center-weighted metering overexpose.
2. To prevent vignette, I have to avoid f/5.6. This means my portraits now have larger depth of field, which robs them of the effect I am trying to achieve!
3. Finally, I just cannot trust Nikkor lenses any longer. In producing cheap, “consumer” lenses, Nikon is clearly compromising on quality. Hence, to get the same sharpness I used to get before, I am now forced to buy more expensive professional lenses, i.e. the hobby just became more expensive!
4. On my film camera, I broke the built in flash long back, hence I never know how good/bad that was. So, no comparisons.

I thought of going back to my N4004, but the auto-focus has stopped working (it was one of the first few auto-focus models that Nikon brought out in 1987). Also, I recently damaged the CPU contacts on the inexpensive Sigma 70-210 zoom (which gave me wonderful portraits with no vignette and no loss of sharpness). So there is no going back.

One option I am considering is to go buy a non-Digital third-party lens (maybe Sigma). Non-Digital lenses have an image circle designed for full-frame cameras and hence they eliminate vignette completely. And third party lenses are cheaper than Nikkor. And anyway Nikkor quality is suspect in the consumer segment so why not stick with a third-party lens!

Mango Party at Ranga Shankara

The Ascent of Everest – Project Planning

By now you would have started understanding that this expedition was no seat-of-the-pants adventure but a well planned, formal project. To fully understand how extensive this planning was, read on.

First of all, it is essential to understand that John Hunt believed that it was meaningful and essential to sit down in England, a full six month before the final assault, and plan every little detail of this expedition.

What does “every little detail” mean?

It means details such as  ”how much does a boot weigh?” “How much does a tent weight?” “How much does a sleeping bag weigh?”

Item	Weight
Average-sized high-altitude suit	3 3/4 lb
Climbing boots for use on the Icefall	3 lb 12 oz
Assault boots only for the upper part of the mountain	4 lb 4 oz
Two-man Meade tent	15 lb
Twelve-men dome tents	85 lb & 110 lb
Sleeping bag	9 lb
One “Compo” box containing 14 men’s rations for one day	42 lb
One beverage box containing 14 men’s rations for two day	32 lb

And what is the purpose of these details? I will let John Hunt explain:

After a  detailed calculation of the weight of stores to be carried into the Western Cwm, and of those to be lifted subsequently up the face of Lhotse to the South Col, we arrived at a figure of 34 Sherpas. Of these, fourteen would work in the Icefall, carrying loads to the lip of the Cwm; another fourteen would shift the loads up the Cwm to a camp we named Advance Base, from which, according to the Swiss experience, it seemed appropriate to initiate the assault program. The remaining six were, at that stage of our thinking, intended to accompany each assault, in pairs, from Advance Base to the Col and onwards up the final ridge.

All of us know that god is in the details. Only John Hunt realised that Sherpas were in the details.

Here are his detailed calculations (assuming three Assault teams – two using open-circuit Oxygen equipment and one probably using closed-circuit equipment):

The Ascent of Everest – Governance Structure

The reference, in the project charter, to a formal sponsoring authority clearly points to more formalism than just a project plan. Sure enough, there was even a well defined project governance structure for this expedition:

Source: The Ascent of Everest by John Hunt, p 244

If you ever though, dear reader, that Hillary and Tenzing upped one day and said “let’s climb the Everest”, set out in the morning and returned triumphant by nightfall, I hope you will abandon that thought now.

As can be seen from the Governance Structure above, this expedition had some specialized groups taking ownership for specific activities (physiological research, oxygen research) and collaborating with each other to produce the final result which the whole world is familiar with.

Mull over this: Over fifty years back, for an adventurous activity like climbing the Everest, these guys had a formal governance structure.

Now, contrast that with modern day IT programs that routinely operate without a clear, documented governance structure (even when they involve multiple vendors and internal stakeholders). Then decide whether you want to laugh out loud or weep in despair!