In 1969, two men took a giant leap forward for mankind. The Apollo 11 mission carried significant operational risk, with limitless possible complications that could’ve cost the mission and their lives. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to step on the moon. They orchestrated this vital work using just a timeline on paper. But what if they’d had access to technology to help them manage all of those activities?
Today, major enterprises regularly have to conduct highly complex, vital and high-risk projects to maintain their technology and make changes to remain competitive. Failure or delays can lead to huge consequences for both them and their customers. Still, they must plan and orchestrate these with sub-optimal tools and processes, relying on spreadsheets, project management tools and key individuals to get things over the line. And, as we often see in the news, this doesn’t always go to plan.
Cutover is the work orchestration and observability platform that brings together humans and machines to ensure success in even the most complex of scenarios, including data center migrations, transformation programs and major resilience activities.
Watch the video below to see how Cutover uses the Apollo 11 mission to prove the power of work orchestration and observability - and what it could mean for organizations today navigating complex change.
Full transcript:
In 1969, two men took a giant leap forward for mankind.
The Apollo 11 mission carried significant operational risk, with limitless possible complications that could’ve cost the mission and their lives.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to step on the moon. They orchestrated this vital work using just a timeline on paper.
But what if they’d had access to technology to help them manage all of those activities?
Space missions are complex and dynamic. They are a great paradigm for human and machine collaboration, if not one of the best examples of this relationship to date. Humans are involved in what they do best - accountability, trust and decision making around unintended outcomes. Machines are involved in what they do best - automation of well-defined sets of repeatable activity.
From working with NASA to being the CEO of Cutover, I’ve seen that dynamic critical flows of activity need orchestration and observability to enable teams to move quickly with confidence without falling over in front of the customer.
To show the power of work orchestration and observability, we recreated the original spacewalk timeline in the Cutover platform.
Work is changing. Teams now work collaboratively with multiple technologies. For work to be successful, humans and machines need to coordinate intelligently.
In Cutover, the spacewalk timeline becomes an intelligent runbook, with activities planned to the second and connected by a dependency-led critical path. Automation promotes efficiency in task handoffs.
Course correcting for in-flight surprises becomes easy and collaborative.
While orchestration coordinates work, observability brings visibility and control across it.
In the Cutover platform, the spacewalk runbook is part of a wider body of Apollo 11 runbooks that orchestrate the entire mission.
Live dashboard reporting keeps Houston up to date with the mission progress.
During the spacewalk, the runbook dashboard gives Mission Control real-time data, helping them track astronaut activity and make smart decisions.
Buzz and Neil coordinate via Node Map technology, visualizing the flow of work and seeing where there are parallel tasks.
Observability helps us learn for future missions too. Automatic recording of what happened during execution facilitates analysis and improvement.
Once, you had to be in mission control to know what was going on. Now, orchestration enables us all to work effectively, quickly and safely, while observability provides us confidence that we’re moving in the right direction.
Find out more about Cutover by downloading our fact sheet.