Contract Management

Maxwell’s Demon: Planning for Technology Obsolescence in Acquisition Strategy

Imagine a chamber divided into two parts by a removable partition. On one side is a hot sample of gas and on the other side a cold sample of the same gas. The chamber is a closed system with a certain amount of order, because the statistically faster moving molecules of the hot gas on one side of the partition are segregated from statistically slower moving molecules of the cold gas on the other side. Maxwell’s demon guards a trap door in the partition, which is still assumed not to conduct heat. It spots molecules coming from either side and judges their speeds…The perverse demon manipulates the trap door so as to allow passage only to the very slowest molecules of the hot gas and the very fastest molecules of the cold gas. Thus the cold gas receives extremely slow molecules, cooling it further, and the hot gas receives extremely fast molecules, making it even hotter. In apparent defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, the demon has caused heat to flow from the cold gas to the hot one. What is going on?

Because the law applies only to a closed system, we must include the demon in our calculations. Its increase of entropy must be at least as great as the decrease of entropy in the gas-filled halves of the chamber. What is it like for the demon to increase its entropy? –Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1994, pp. 222-223

“Entropy is a figure of speech, then,” sighed Nefastis, “a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.” –Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, J.B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1965

Technology Acquisition: The Basics

I’ve recently been involved in discussions regarding software development and acquisition that cut across several disciplines that should be of interest to anyone engaged in project management in general, but IT project management and acquisition in particular.

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Shake it Out – Embracing the Future of Program Management – Part Two: Private Industry Program and Project Management in Aerospace, Space, and Defense

In my previous post, I focused on Program and Project Management in the Public Interest, and the characteristics of its environment, especially from the perspective of the government program and acquisition disciplines. The purpose of this exploration is to lay the groundwork for understanding the future of program management—and the resulting technological and organizational challenges that are required to support that change.

The next part of this exploration is to define the motivations, characteristics, and disciplines of private industry equivalencies. Here there are commonalities, but also significant differences, that relate to the relationship and interplay between public investment, policy and acquisition, and private business interests.

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Shake it Out – Embracing the Future in Program Management – Part One: Program and Project Management in the Public Interest

I heard the song from which I derived the title to this post sung by Florence and the Machine and was inspired to sit down and write about what I see as the future in program management.

Thus, my blogging radio silence has ended as I begin to process and share my observations and essential achievements over the last couple of years.

My company—the conduit that provides the insights I share here—is SNA Software LLC. We are a small, veteran-owned company and we specialize in data capture, transformation, contextualization and visualization. We do it in a way that removes significant effort in these processes, ensures reliability and trust, to incorporate off-the-shelf functionality that provides insight, and empowers the user by leveraging the power of open systems, especially in program and project management.

Program and Project Management in the Public Interest

There are two aspects to the business world that we inhabit: commercial and government; both, however, usually relate to some aspect of the public interest, which is our forte.

There are also two concepts about this subject to unpack.

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Take Me To The River, Part 3, Technical Performance and Risk Management Digital Elements of Integrated Program Management

Part three of this series of articles on the elements of Integrated Program and Project Management will focus on two additional areas of IPM: technical performance and risk management. Prior to jumping in, however–and given the timeframe over which I’ve written this series–a summary to date is in order.

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Back to School Daze Blogging–DCMA Investigation on POGO, DDSTOP, $600 Ashtrays,and Epistemic Sunk Costs

Family summer visits and trips are in the rear view–as well as the simultaneous demands of balancing the responsibilities of a, you know, day job–and so it is time to take up blogging once again.

I will return to my running topic of Integrated Program and Project Management in short order, but a topic of more immediate interest concerns the article that appeared on the website for pogo.org last week entitled “Pentagon’s Contracting Gurus Mismanaged Their Own Contracts.” Such provocative headlines are part and parcel of organizations like POGO, which have an agenda that seems to cross the line between reasonable concern and unhinged outrage with a tinge conspiracy mongering. But the content of the article itself is accurate and well written, if also somewhat ripe with overstatement, so I think it useful to unpack what it says and what it means.

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Take Me To The River, Part 2, Schedule Elements–A Digital Inventory of Integrated Program Management Elements

Recent attendance at various forums to speak has interrupted the flow of this series on IPM elements. Among these venues I was engaged in discussions regarding this topic, as well as the effects of acquisition reform on the IT, program, and project management communities in the DoD and A&D marketplace.

For this post I will restrict the topic to what are often called schedule elements, though that is a nebulous term. Also, one should not draw a conclusion that because I am dealing with this topic following cost elements, that it is somehow inferior in importance to those elements. On the contrary, planning and scheduling are integral to applying resources and costs, in tracking cost performance, and in our systemic analysis its activities, artifacts, and elements are antecedent to cost element considerations.

The Relative Position of Schedule

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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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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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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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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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