Author: Nick Pisano

The Stories of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated — And A Customer Bill of Rights in Software

I have been quite busy of late–with a good deal of travel mixed in–and so my posts have been stacked up in various states of completion. Thus, given a holiday and more travel next week, my postings will be fairly close to one another. If you missed my recent post on a digital IPM inventory please follow this link.

This post is somewhat focused on business owners, especially those in the technology industry not enamored of flimflam or used car salesman tactics. But it is also of interest to any organization or individuals who procure or are thinking of procuring software and their associated services.

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Take Me to the River, Part 1, Cost Elements – A Digital Inventory of Integrated Program Management Elements

In a previous post I recommended a venue focused on program managers to define what constitutes integrated program management. Since that time I have been engaged with thought leaders and influencers in both government and industry, many of whom came to a similar conclusion independently, agree in this proposition and who are working to bring it about.

My own interest in this discussion is from the perspective of maximization of the information ecosystem that underlies and describes the systems known as projects and programs. But what do I mean by this? This is more than a gratuitous question, because oftentimes the information essential to defining project and program performance and behavior are intermixed, and therefore diluted and obfuscated, by confusion with those of the overall enterprise.

Project vs. Program

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Learning the (Data) — Data-Driven Management, HBR Edition

The months of December and January are usually full of reviews of significant events and achievements during the previous twelve months. Harvard Business Review makes the search for some of the best writing on the subject of data-driven transformation by occasionally publishing in one volume the best writing on a critical subject of interest to professional through the magazine OnPoint. It is worth making part of your permanent data management library.

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Post-Workshop Talking Blues — No Bucks, No Buck Rogers: Cashflow Analysis in Projects (Somewhat Wonkish)

When I used this analogy the week before last during the last Integrated Project Management Workshop in the D.C. area I was accused of dating myself–and perhaps it is true. For those wondering the quote was popularized by the 1983 movie The Right Stuff, which was based on the 1979 book written by Tom Wolfe of the same title. The book and movie was about the beginnings of the U.S. space program culminating in the creation of NASA and the Project Mercury program.

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Money for Nothing — Project Performance Data and Efficiencies in Timeliness

I operate in a well regulated industry focused on project management. What this means practically is that there are data streams that flow from the R&D activities, recording planning and progress, via control and analytical systems to both management and customer. The contract type in most cases is Cost Plus, with cost and schedule risk often flowing to the customer in the form of cost overruns and schedule slippages.

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Synergy — The Economics of Integrated Project Management

The hot topic lately in meetings and the odd conference on Integrated Project Management (IPM) often focuses on the mechanics of achieving that state, bound by the implied definition of current regulation, which has also become–not surprisingly–practice. I think this is a laudable goal, particularly given both the casual resistance to change (which always there by definition to some extent) and in the most extreme cases a kind of apathy.

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All Along the Watch Tower — Project Monitoring vs. Project Management

My two month summer blogging hiatus has come to a close. Along the way I have gathered a good bit of practical knowledge related to introducing and implementing process and technological improvements into complex project management environments. More specifically, my experience is in introducing new adaptive technologies that support the integration of essential data across the project environment–integrated project management in short–and do so by focusing on knowledge discovery in databases (KDD).

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Ground Control from Major Tom — Breaking Radio Silence: New Perspectives on Project Management

Since I began this blog I have used it as a means of testing out and sharing ideas about project management, information systems, as well to cover occasional thoughts about music, the arts, and the meaning of wisdom.

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Rear View Mirror — Correcting a Project Management Fallacy

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” —  William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Over the years I and others have briefed project managers on project performance using KPPs, earned value management, schedule analysis, business analytics, and what we now call predictive analytics. Oftentimes, some set of figures will be critiqued as being ineffective or unhelpful; that the analytics “only look in the rear view mirror” and that they “tell me what I already know.”

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Like Tinker to Evers to Chance: BI to BA to KDD

It’s spring training time in sunny Florida, as well as other areas of the country with mild weather and baseball.  For those of you new to the allusion, it comes from a poem by Franklin Pierce Adams and is also known as “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon”.  Tinker, Evers, and Chance were the double play combination of the 1910 Chicago Cubs (shortstop, second base, and first base).  Because of their effectiveness on the field these Cubs players were worthy opponents of the old New York Giants, for whom Adams was a fan, and who were the kings of baseball during most of the first fifth of a century of the modern era (1901-1922).  That is, until they were suddenly overtaken by their crosstown rivals, the Yankees, who came to dominate baseball for the next 40 years, beginning with the arrival of Babe Ruth.

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