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.
(more…)Business Management
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.
(more…)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.
(more…)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.
(more…)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).
(more…)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.
(more…)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.”
(more…)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.
(more…)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).
(more…)Don’t Know Much…–Knowledge Discovery in Data
A short while ago I found myself in an odd venue where a question was posed about my being an educated individual, as if it were an accusation. Yes, I replied, but then, after giving it some thought, I made some qualifications to my response. Educated regarding what?
It seems that, despite a little more than a century of public education and widespread advanced education having been adopted in the United States, along with the resulting advent of widespread literacy, that we haven’t entirely come to grips with what it means. For the question of being an “educated person” has its roots in an outmoded concept–an artifact of the 18th and 19th century–where education was delineated, and availability determined, by class and profession. Perhaps this is the basis for the large strain of anti-intellectualism and science denial in the society at large.
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Life, Project Management, and Everything 
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