At the beginning of the year we are greeted with the annual list of hottest “project management trends” prognostications. We are now three months into the year and I think it worthwhile to note the latest developments that have come up in project management meetings, conferences, and in the field. Some of these are in alignment with what you may have seen in some earlier articles, but these are four that I find to be most significant thus far, and there may be a couple of surprises for you here.
(more…)Project Management
Let the Journey Begin — Mentoring a Better Project Manager
I have been involved in discussions lately regarding mentoring in the project management and IT business management field. The question is: what does it take to build a better project manager given the rapidly changing paradigm defining the profession?
Having mentored many younger people over the course of a 22 year plus career in the United States Navy–and then afterward in private business–I have given this line of thought a great deal of consideration. Over the years I have been applying personnel development and growth strategies as one assigned to lead both men and women among the uniformed military, civil service, and contractor communities. Some of these efforts were notable for their successes. In a few cases I failed to inspire or motivate.
(more…)I Get By With A Little Help… — Avoiding NIH in Project Management
…from my colleagues, friends, family, associates, advisors, mentors, subcontractors, consultants, employees. And not necessarily in that order.
The term NIH in this context is not referring to the federal agency. It is shorthand, instead, for “Not Invented Here”. I was reminded of this particular mindset when driving through an old neighborhood where I served as a community organizer. At one of the meetings of a local board, which was particularly dysfunctional (and where I was attempting to reform their dysfunction), a member remarked: “I am tired of hearing about how this or that particular issue was handled somewhere else.” Yes, I thought, why would we possibly want to know how Portland, or D.C., or Boston, or Denver, or Phoenix–or any of the number of other places faced with the same issue–effectively or ineffectively dealt with it before us? What could they possibly teach us?
(more…)The Big (D) — Ways of Looking at Big Data
Recently I have been involved in several efforts regarding what is often referred to as Big Data, but of a particular kind. Oftentimes the term, which was first defined by Doug Laney now at Gartner, is seen as utilizing data in order to monetize consumer information that is being collected to allow business to focus advertising, marketing, and product development. More generally, however, big data (as defined by Laney) distinguishes itself from normal relational database management by its volume, variety, velocity, variability, and complexity. The Wikipedia definition is slightly different with the additional attribute of veracity.
(more…)No Bucks, No Buck Rogers — Project Work Authorizations, Change Control, and Cash Flow
As I’ve written here most recently, the most significant proposal coming out of the Integrated Program Management Conference (IPMC) this year was the comprehensive manner of integrating all essential elements of a project, presented by Glen Alleman et al. In their presentation, Alleman, Coonce, and Price, present a process flow (which, in my estimation, should be mirrored in data and information flow) in which program artifacts were imbued with measures of effectiveness, measures of performance, and measures of progress, to achieve an organic integration of all parts of the project that allow the project team to make a valid assessment of achievement against the plan, informed by risk and opportunity. (Emphasis my own). The three-legged stool of cost, schedule, and technical performance are thereby integrated properly at the appropriate level of the project structure, and done in such a way as to overcome the rigidity and fallacy of the single point estimate.
(more…)IMPish Grin — The Connection for Technical Measures (and everything else)
Glen Alleman at his Herding Cats blog has posted his presentation on the manner of integrating technical performance measures in a cohesive and logical manner with project schedule and cost measurement. Many in the DoD and A&D-focused project community are aware of the work of many of us in this area (my own paper is posted on the College of Performance Management library page here) but the work of Alleman, Coonce, and Price take these concepts a step further. I wrote an earlier post about the white paper but the presentation demonstrates clearly the flow of logic in constructing not only a model in which technical performance is incorporated into the project plan through measures of effectiveness that are derived from the statement of work, but then makes the connection to measures of progress and measures of performance, clearly outlining the proper integration of the core elements of project planning, execution, and control.
(more…)Highway to the (Neutral) Zone — Net Neutrality and More on Information Economics
Net Neutrality was very much in the news this week. First, the President came out in favor of Net Neutrality on Monday. Then later in the week the chair of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, who looked like someone caught with his hands in the cookie jar, vacillated on how the agency sees the concept of Net Neutrality. Some members of Congress have taken exception.
(more…)Ace of Base(line) — A New Paper on Building a Credible PMB
Glen Alleman, a leading consultant in program management (who also has a blog that I follow), Tom Coonce of the Institute for Defense Analyses, and Rick Price of Lockheed Martin, have jointly published a new paper in the College of Performance Management’s Measureable News entitled “Building A Credible Performance Measurement Baseline.”
The elements of their proposal for constructing a credible PMB, from my initial reading, are as follows:
(more…)Family Affair — Part III — Private Monopsony, Monopoly, and the Disaccumulation of Capital
It’s always good to be ahead of the power curve. I see that the eminent Paul Krugman had an editorial in the New York Times about the very issues that I’ve dealt with in this blog, his example in this case being Amazon. This is just one of many articles that have been raised about the monopsony power as a result of the Hatchette controversy. In The New Republic Franklin Foer also addresses this issue at length in the article “Amazon Must Be Stopped.” In my last post on this topic I discussed public monopsony, an area in which I have a great deal of expertise. But those of us in the information world that are not Microsoft, Oracle, Google, or one of the other giants also live in the world of private monopsony.
(more…)More on Excel…the contributing factor of poor Project Management apps
Some early comments via e-mails on my post on why Excel is not a PM tool raised the issue that I was being way too hard on IT shops and letting application providers off the hook. The asymmetry was certainly not the intention (at least not consciously).
When approaching an organization seeking process and technology improvement, oftentimes the condition of using Excel is what we in the technology/PM industry conveniently call “workarounds.” Ostensibly these workarounds are temporary measures to address a strategic or intrinsic organizational need that will eventually be addressed by a more cohesive software solution. In all too many cases, however, the workaround turns out to be semi-permanent.
A case in point in basic project management concerns Work Authorizations Documents (WADs) and Baseline Change Requests (BCRs).
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