Science

Red Queen Race: Project Management and Running Against Time

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast, as that!” —Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Chapter 2, Lewis Carroll

There have been a number of high profile examples over the last several years concerning project management failure and success. For example, in the former case, the initial rollout of the Affordable Care Act marketplace web portal was one of these, and the causes for its faults took a while to understand, absent political bias. The reasons, as the linked article show, are prosaic and basic to the discipline of project management.

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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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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.

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