I finished reading the book Failure Is Not An Option by Gene Kranz. It was really a good book and I would highly recommend it to anyone that is interested in the early days of NASA mission control and the lunar missions, including Apollo 13.
One of the things that I got out of reading this book was the importance of having a highly skilled and competent operations staff. It seems to me that as technology improves, we place less and less emphasis on operations personell and more on automation. That is fine, until something breaks. NASA was fortunate to have such a qualified group of operators. The mission success rate would have been much lower without them.