Author: Nick Pisano

Back in the Saddle Again — Putting the SME into the UI Which Equals UX

“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”  — Statement by Henry Ford in “My Life and Work”, by Henry Ford, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, 1922, page 72

The Henry Ford quote, which he made half-jokingly to his sales staff in 1909, is relevant to this discussion because the information sector has developed along the lines of the auto and many other industries.  The statement was only half-joking because Ford’s cars could be had in three colors.  But in 1909 Henry Ford had found a massive market niche that would allow him to sell inexpensive cars to the masses.  His competition wasn’t so much as other auto manufacturers, many of whom catered to the whims of the rich and more affluent members of society, but against the main means of individualized transportation at the time–the horse and buggy.  The color was not so much important to this market as was the need for simplicity and utility.

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Keep on Keeping On — Feedspot Ranks “Life, Project Management, and Everything” among Top 50 PM Blogs

Feedspot has published its rankings of the top 50 project management blogs and this site found itself squarely near the middle ranked at number 24.  For those in the project management discipline, I strongly recommend you check out the list and bookmark all of them. They have a number of interesting lists by topic and so it is worth exploring beyond just PM.  I read just about every one of the blogs noted on the PM list on a regular basis, which are both a source of inspiration and discovery.

A big thanks to those of you who read this blog and to the Feedspot editors for the acknowledgment.  A great deal of research and work goes into each of the posts on this blog, whether about project management or other subjects that pique my interest.  I would like to post more frequently, but my day job and living impose demands that limit my ability to write.  Regardless, don’t give up on me during my short periods of writing hiatus.  In all probability, I am working some problem of interest and am not yet ready to share my results for vetting.

Takin’ Care of Business — Information Economics in Project Management

Neoclassical economics abhors inefficiency, and yet inefficiencies exist.  Among the core issues that create inefficiencies is the asymmetrical nature of information.  Asymmetry is an accepted cornerstone of economics that leads to inefficiency.  We can see in our daily lives and employment the effects of one party in a transaction having more information than the other:  knowing whether the used car you are buying is a lemon, measuring risk in the purchase of an investment and, apropos to this post, identifying how our information systems allow us to manage complex projects.

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Veteran’s Day 2016 and Civic Courage

Robert Gould Shaw memorial
Photo by the author of the Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Memorial in Boston

The memorial pictured that sits on Boston Common marks a bit of history that is but an echo of an earlier time to us, it affected me greatly when I actually saw it up close, for it spoke to me.  I felt a kinship over time and space to those men who are represented in bronze and stone and what they might have been thinking as they marched in the cause of equality for all people, of self-government, and of a steady intolerance of extremism, ruthlessness, and violence in defense of a cause, which cause itself was morally repugnant; fear, no doubt, trepidation, hope, pride, and steely resolve to acquit themselves well when the time came for them to do their duty.  It was a time where warfare was very close and personal.

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Loose (Data) Sinks Ships — OpSec for the Information Age

More than a year ago I attended an on-line seminar for businesses that do business with federal agencies.  The speaker, in a refrain now heard quite often said:  “There are two types of businesses; those who have been hacked by the Chinese and those that don’t know they have been hacked by the Chinese.”  While there is a bit of hyperbole in that statement, it does make a valid point, and it is that all data with which we work in this new interconnected age of the internet and social media is vulnerable to being exposed to those who do not have a need to know if we don’t institute the right countermeasures.

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Technical Foul — It’s Time for TPI in EVM

For more than 40 years the discipline of earned value management (EVM) has gone through a number of changes in its descriptions, governance, and procedures.  During that same time its community has been resistant to improvements in its methodology or to changes that extend its value when taking into account other methods that either augment its usefulness, or that potentially provide more utility in the area of performance management.  This has been especially the case where it is suggested that EVM is just one of many methodologies that contribute to this assessment under a more holistic approach.

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New York Times Says Research and Development Is Hard…but maybe not

At least that is what a reader is led to believe by reading this article that appeared over the weekend.  For those of you who didn’t catch it, Alphabet, which formerly had an R&D shop under the old Google moniker known as Google X, does pure R&D.  According to the reporter, one Conor Doughtery, the problem, you see, is that R&D doesn’t always translate into a direct short-term profit.  He then makes this absurd statement:  “Building a research division is an old and often unsuccessful concept.”  He knows this because some professor at Arizona State University–that world-leading hotbed of innovation and high tech–told him so.  (Yes, there is sarcasm in that sentence).

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My Little Town — Orlando, Florida

Pulse Orlando memorial
Photo courtesy of Donna Pisano

Conference, workshop, and vacation season had slowed blogging of late.  When it was over I had a number of things to post regarding interesting discussions and trends in the field of project management.  Then on my return to my adopted home town of Orlando, the singer Christina Grimmie was shot and killed after performing a concert at the local music venue The Plaza Live–a beautiful young woman senselessly struck down by a cypher of a man.  Then, early on Sunday my wife and I woke to the news of the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub.  Both venues are less than two miles from our home.

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The (Contract) is parent to the (Project)

At a recent conference one of the more interesting conversations surrounded the difference between contract and project management.  To many people this is one of the same–and a simple Google search reinforces this perception–but, I think, this is a misconception.

The context of the discussion was interesting in that it occurred during an earned value management-focused event.  EVM pitches itself as the glue that binds together the parts of project management that further constitutes integrated project management, but I respectfully disagree.  If we ignore the self-promotion of this position and like good engineers stick to our empiricist approach, we will find that EVM is a method of deriving the financial value of effort within a project.  It is also a pretty good indicator of cost risk manifestation.  This last shouldn’t be taken too far.

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I Can’t Drive 55 — The New York Times and Moore’s Law

Yesterday the New York Times published an article about Moore’s Law.  While interesting in that John Markoff, who is the Times science writer, speculates that in about 5 years the computing industry will be “manipulating material as small as atoms” and therefore may hit a wall in what has become a back of the envelope calculation of the multiplicative nature of computing complexity and power in the silicon age.

This article prompted a follow on from Brian Feldman at NY Mag, that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has anticipated a broader definition of the phenomenon of the accelerating rate of computing power to take into account quantum computing.  Note here that the definition used in this context is the literal one: the doubling of the number of transistors over time that can be placed on a microchip.  That is a correct summation of what Gordon Moore said, but it not how Moore’s Law is viewed or applied within the tech industry.

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