As most people know, the US government was sent into shutdown when the House could not agree on certain issues revolving around healthcare. While the idea of a “government shutdown” sounds alarmingly like the premise of yet another disaster movie, this shutdown looks a lot more like a bunch of old men sitting around and twiddling their thumbs. Meanwhile, while life remains pretty much unaffected for most of these politicians, almost every public service has been entirely shut down, which is definitely an operations problem, and an economic one as a whole.

For example, major public landmarks such as New York’s ever famous Lady Liberty is unavailable to the general public because the US government has decided to cease functioning. This not only means a lack of revenue from tourism to the iconic statue, it also means that several people that find employment in the large droves of traffic the statue gets are currently unemployed.

Space frontier explorers and the stuff of dreams NASA has sent home 97% of their employees, halting all the research, development, building, and general work done by the program. Operations managers are inevitably going to have to deal with crisis management and attempting to fasttrack the progress of these developments in order to reach the goals set in place at the targeted time.

When the shutdown ends and Congress gets back on track, I think it’s be interesting to see how operations managers will deal with all the delays in progress for all of the affected systems, programs, and companies. This is definitely one to watch out for.

http://www.space.com/23014-nasa-government-shutdown-effects-obama-statement.html