Project Management

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.

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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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Islands in the Stream — Data Streams and Data Islands in Project Management

In meeting, conference, and travel mode but a few thoughts on issues that have arisen over the last few days.

One of these is the concept of understanding how data flows within and between organizations.  The confusion often arises by mixing in issues of reporting and report formatting into the discussion.  No doubt these perspectives continue to persist–a type of Zombie argument–because is it hard for non-techies to understand that, given data, such views–which oftentimes are posed as impediments and counterfactuals to data optimization–become trivial.

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The Future — Data Focus vs. “Tools” Focus

The title in this case is from the Leonard Cohen song.

Over the last few months I’ve come across this issue quite a bit and it goes to the heart of where software technology is leading us.  The basic question that underlies this issue can be boiled down into the issue of whether software should be thought of as a set of “tools” or an overarching solution that can handle data in a way that the organization requires.  It is a fundamental question because what we call Big Data–despite all of the hoopla–is really a relative term that changes with hardware, storage, and software scalability.  What was Big Data in 1997 is not Big Data in 2016, and will not be Big Data in 2030.

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For What It’s Worth — More on the Materiality and Prescriptiveness Debate and How it Affects Technological Solutions

The underlying basis on the materiality vs. prescriptiveness debate that I previously wrote about lies in two areas:  contractual compliance, especially in the enforcement of public contracts, and the desired outcomes under the establishment of a regulatory regime within an industry.  Sometimes these purposes are in agreement and sometimes they are in conflict and work at cross-purposes to one another.

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I Still Can’t Find What I’m Looking For — The Materiality vs. Prescriptiveness Controversy in Project Management Oversight

I’ve had a number of conversations over the last four months on this issue, mostly from the technical solution side rather than the issue side.  But intent does eventually translate into action and so it is an important issue to tackle.  Usually this issue comes up within the context of the purpose of audit.  But then, we have to understand the purpose of audit itself within the context of project management.

For example, it is assumed that in project management that we are dealing with an oversight and regulatory regime.  There are dichotomies to this.

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Second Foundation — More on a General Theory of Project Management

In ending my last post on developing a general theory of project management, I introduced the concept of complex adaptive systems (CAS) and posited that projects and their ecosystems fall into this specific category of systems theory.  I also posited that it is through the tools of CAS that we will gain insight into the behavior of projects.  The purpose is not only to identify commonalities in these systems across what is frequently asserted are irreconcilable across economic market verticals, but to identify regularities and the proper math in determining the behavior of these systems.

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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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