NASA was originally conceived as an engineering organization. Its early leadership considered engineering excellence to be the sine qua non of the agency's existence. Throughout the organization, management attention was focused primarily on making the correct engineering decision to maximize mission success. Programmatic issues, such as budgetary and schedule ramifications, were always part of the decisions, but these issues were considered to be less important than making certain that the engineering was sound. Over the years there has been a major paradigmatic shift in the way that NASA projects are managed.
Engineering is no longer the primary consideration on agency missions.
Programmatics have become the name of the game. Today a project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or one of the other NASA centers faces an endless sequence of high level reviews of his program's budget and schedule, with significantly less review of the soundness of its engineering design. In such a bureaucratic environment, detailed knowledge of the quarterly costs of each of the major engineering subsystems is a more important attribute for a project manager than a thorough understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the spacecraft system design. Under the old NASA paradigm, many projects overran their budgets and some even missed their scheduled launch dates. In truth, sometimes too little attention was paid to programmatic issues.