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…)Project Management
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.
(more…)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.
(more…)River Deep, Mountain High — A Matrix of Project Data
Been attending conferences and meetings of late and came upon a discussion of the means of reducing data streams while leveraging Moore’s Law to provide more, better data. During a discussion with colleagues over lunch they asked if asking for more detailed data would provide greater insight. This led to a discussion of the qualitative differences in data depending on what information is being sought. My response to more detailed data was to respond: “well there has to be a pony in there somewhere.” This was greeted by laughter, but then I finished the point: more detailed data doesn’t necessarily yield greater insight (though it could and only actually looking at it will tell you that, particularly in applying the principle of KDD). But more detailed data that is based on a hierarchical structure will, at the least, provide greater reliability and pinpoint areas of intersection to detect areas of risk manifestation that is otherwise averaged out–and therefore hidden–at the summary levels.
(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.
(more…)Technical Ecstacy — Technical Performance and Earned Value
As many of my colleagues in project management know, I wrote a series of articles on the application of technical performance risk in project management back in 1997, one of which made me an award recipient from the institution now known as Defense Acquisition University. Over the years various researchers and project organizations have asked me if I have any additional thoughts on the subject and the response up until now has been: no. From a practical standpoint, other responsibilities took me away from the domain of determining the best way of recording technical achievement in complex projects. Furthermore, I felt that the field was not ripe for further development until there were mathematics and statistical methods that could better approach the behavior of complex adaptive systems.
(more…)Big Time — Elements of Data Size in Scaling
I’ve run into additional questions about scalability. It is significant to understand the concept in terms of assessing software against data size, since there are actually various aspect of approaching the issue.
Unlike situations where data is already sorted and structured as part of the core functionality of the software service being provided, this is in dealing in an environment where there are many third-party software “tools” that put data into proprietary silos. These act as barriers to optimizing data use and gaining corporate intelligence. The goal here is to apply in real terms the concept that the customers generating the data (or stakeholders who pay for the data) own the data and should have full use of it across domains. In project management and corporate governance this is an essential capability.
(more…)I Can See Clearly Now — Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Data Scalability, and Data Relevance
I recently returned from a travel and much of the discussion revolved around the issues of scalability and the use of data. What is clear is that the conversation at the project manager level is shifting from a long-running focus on reports and metrics to one focused on data and what can be learned from it. As with any technology, information technology exploits what is presented before it. Most recently, accelerated improvements in hardware and communications technology has allowed us to begin to collect and use ever larger sets of data.
(more…)Three’s a Crowd — The Nash Equilibrium, Computer Science, and Economics (and what it means for Project Management theory)
Over the last couple of weeks reading picked up on an interesting article via Brad DeLong’s blog, who picked it up from Larry Hardesty at MIT News. First a little background devoted to defining terms. The Nash Equilibrium is a part of Game Theory in measuring how and why people make choices in social networks. As defined in this Columbia University paper:
A game (in strategic or normal form) consists of the following three elements: a set of players, a set of actions (or pure-strategies) available to each player, and a payoff (or utility) function for each player. The payoff functions represent each player’s preferences over action profiles, where an action profile is simply a list of actions, one for each player. A pure-strategy Nash equilibrium is an action profile with the property that no single player can obtain a higher payoff by deviating unilaterally from this profile.
(more…)The Monster Mash — Zombie Ideas in Project and Information Management
Just completed a number of meetings and discussions among thought leaders in the area of complex project management this week, and I was struck by a number of zombie ideas in project management, especially related to information, that just won’t die. The use of the term zombie idea is usually attributed to the Nobel economist Paul Krugman from his excellent and highly engaging (as well as brutally honest) posts at the New York Times, but for those not familiar, a zombie idea is “a proposition that has been thoroughly refuted by analysis and evidence, and should be dead — but won’t stay dead because it serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices, or both.”
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