Author: Nick Pisano

Talking (Project Systems) Blues: A Foundation for a General Theory

As with those of you who observe the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, I find myself suddenly in a state of stasis and, as a result, with feet firmly on the ground, able to write a post.  This is preface to pointing out that the last couple of weeks have been both busy and productive in a positive way.

Among the events of the last two weeks was the meeting of project management professionals focused on the discipline of aerospace and defense at the Integrated Program Management Workshop.  This vertical, unlike other areas of project management, is characterized by applying a highly structured approach that involves a great deal of standardization.  Most often, people involved in this area tend to engage in an area where the public sector plays a strong role in defining the environment in which the market operates.  Furthermore, the major suppliers tend to be limited, and so both oligopolistic and monopolistic market competition defines the market space.

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Stay Calm and Carry On — The Business End of Software: How to handle malicious rumors

Veteran’s Day is approaching and, with it, the finale of conference and workshop season for people in my business.  Lately I have been engaged with the less than scrupulous members of my discipline who engage in character assassination and rumor.  Every market has bad players, and one must make the choice of whether you want to run with the black hats or the white hats.  I’m not referring to hackers here but to individuals who are less than savory in their business practices.  So here are a few bits of advice in how to handle such issues:

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Repeat after me — Excel is not a project management solution

Aside from dealing with organizations that oftentimes must use Excel as workarounds due to limitations of legacy software systems, I was reminded of the ubiquity of Excel in a recent article by my colleague Dave Gordon at AITS on the use and misuse of RAID (Risk Assumptions, Issues, and Decisions).  His overall assessment of the weakness of how RAID can be applied is quite valid.  But the literature on risk is quite extensive.  The article “Risk Management Is How Adults Manage Projects” at Glen Alleman’s Herding Cats blog is just one quick overview of a very mature process that has a large amount of academic, statistical, mathematical, and methodological grounding.

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Stay Open — Open and Proprietary Databases (and Why It Matters)

The last couple of weeks have been fairly intense workwise and so blogging has lagged a bit.  Along the way the matter of databases came up at a customer site and what constitutes open data and what comprises proprietary data.  The reason why this issue matters to customers rests of several foundations.

First, in any particular industry or niche there is a wide variety of specialized apps that have blossomed.  This is largely due to Moore’s Law.  Looking at the number of hosted and web apps alone can be quite overwhelming, particularly given the opaqueness of what one is buying at any particular time when it comes to software technology.

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Walk This Way — DoD IG Reviews DCMA Contracting Officer Business Systems Deficiencies

The sufficiency and effectiveness of business systems is an essential element in the project management ecosystem.  Far beyond performance measurement of the actual effort, the sufficiency of the business systems to support the effort are essential in its success.  If the systems in place do not properly track and record the transactions behind the work being performed, the credibility of the data is called into question.  Furthermore, support and logistical systems, such as procurement, supply, and material management, contribute in a very real way, to work accomplishment.  If that spare part isn’t in-house on time, the work stops.

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New Directions — Fourth Generation apps, Agile, and the New Paradigm

The world is moving forward and Moore’s Law is accelerating in interesting ways on the technology side, which opens new opportunities, especially in software.  In the past I have spoken of the flexibility of Fourth Generation software, that is, software that doesn’t rely on structured hardcoding, but instead, is focused on the data to deliver information to the user in more interesting and essential ways.  I work in this area for my day job, and so using such technology has tipped over more than a few rice bowls.

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Do You Believe in Magic? — Big Data, Buzz Phrases, and Keeping Feet Planted Firmly on the Ground

My alternative title for this post was “Money for Nothing,” which is along the same lines.  I have been engaged in discussions regarding Big Data, which has become a bit of a buzz phrase of late in both business and government.  Under the current drive to maximize the value of existing data, every data source, stream, lake, and repository (and the list goes on) has been subsumed by this concept.  So, at the risk of being a killjoy, let me point out that not all large collections of data is “Big Data.”  Furthermore, once a category of data gets tagged as Big Data, the further one seems to depart from the world of reality in determining how to approach and use the data.  So for of you who find yourself in this situation, let’s take a collective deep breath and engage our critical thinking skills.

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Rise of the Machines — Drivers of Change in Business and Project Management

Last week I found myself in business development mode, as I often am, in explaining to a prospective client our future plans in terms of software development.  The point that I was making was that it was not our goal to simply reproduce the functionality that every other software solution provider offered, but to improve how the industry does business by making the drive for change through the application of appropriate technology so compelling through efficiencies, elimination of redundancy, and improved productivity, that not making the change would be deemed foolish.  In sum, we are out to take a process and improve on it through the application of disruptive technology.  I highlighted my point by stating:  “It is not our goal to simply reproduce functionality so we can party like it’s 1998, it’s been eight software generations since that time and technology has provided us smarter and better ways of doing things.”

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The Water is Wide — Data Streams and Data Reservoirs

I’ve had a lot of opportunities lately, in a practical way, to focus on data quality and approaches to data.  There is some criticism in our industry about using metaphors to describe concepts in computing.

Like any form of literature, however, there are good and bad metaphors.  Opposing them in general, I think, is contrarian posing.  Metaphors, after all, often allow us to discover insights into an otherwise opaque process, clarifying in our mind’s eye what is being observed through the process of deriving similarities to something more familiar.  Strong metaphors allow us to identify analogues among the phenomena being observed, providing a ready path to establishing a hypothesis.  Having served this purpose, we can test that hypothesis to see if the metaphor serves our purposes in contributing to understanding.

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Super Doodle Dandy (Software) — Decorator Crabs and Wirth’s Law

decorator-crab[1]

The song (absent the “software” part) in the title is borrowed from the soundtrack of the movie, The Incredible Mr. Limpet.  Made in the day before Pixar and other recent animation technologies, it remains a largely unappreciated classic; combining photography and animation in a time of more limited tools, but with Don Knotts creating another unforgettable character beyond Barney Fife.  Somewhat related to what I am about to write, Mr. Limpet taught the creatures of the sea new ways of doing things, helping them overcome their mistaken assumptions about the world.

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