Technology

Sledgehammer: Pisano Talks!

My blogging hiatus is coming to an end as I take a sledgehammer to the writer’s block wall.

I’ve traveled far and wide over the last six months to various venues across the country and have collected a number of new and interesting perspectives on the issues of data transformation, integrated project management, and business analytics and visualization. As a result, I have developed some very strong opinions regarding the trends that work and those that don’t regarding these topics and will be sharing these perspectives (with the appropriate supporting documentation per usual) in following posts.

To get things started this post will be relatively brief.

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Both Sides Now — The Value of Data Exploration

Over the last several months I have authored a number of stillborn articles that just did not live up to the standards that I set for this blog site. After all, sometimes we just have nothing important to add to the conversation. In a world dominated by narcissism, it is not necessary to constantly have something to say. Some reflection and consideration are necessary, especially if one is to be as succinct as possible.

A quote ascribed to Woodrow Wilson, which may be apocryphal, though it does appear in two of his biographies, was in response to being lauded by someone for making a number of short, succinct, and informative speeches. When asked how he was able to do this, President Wilson is supposed to have replied:

“It depends. If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”

An undisciplined mind has a lot to say about nothing in particular with varying degrees of fidelity to fact or truth. When in normal conversation we most often free ourselves from the discipline expected for more rigorous thinking. This is not necessarily a bad thing if we are saying nothing of consequence and there are gradations, of course. Even the most disciplined mind gets things wrong. We all need editors and fact checkers.

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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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Money for Nothing — Project Performance Data and Efficiencies in Timeliness

I operate in a well regulated industry focused on project management. What this means practically is that there are data streams that flow from the R&D activities, recording planning and progress, via control and analytical systems to both management and customer. The contract type in most cases is Cost Plus, with cost and schedule risk often flowing to the customer in the form of cost overruns and schedule slippages.

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All Along the Watch Tower — Project Monitoring vs. Project Management

My two month summer blogging hiatus has come to a close. Along the way I have gathered a good bit of practical knowledge related to introducing and implementing process and technological improvements into complex project management environments. More specifically, my experience is in introducing new adaptive technologies that support the integration of essential data across the project environment–integrated project management in short–and do so by focusing on knowledge discovery in databases (KDD).

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Like Tinker to Evers to Chance: BI to BA to KDD

It’s spring training time in sunny Florida, as well as other areas of the country with mild weather and baseball.  For those of you new to the allusion, it comes from a poem by Franklin Pierce Adams and is also known as “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon”.  Tinker, Evers, and Chance were the double play combination of the 1910 Chicago Cubs (shortstop, second base, and first base).  Because of their effectiveness on the field these Cubs players were worthy opponents of the old New York Giants, for whom Adams was a fan, and who were the kings of baseball during most of the first fifth of a century of the modern era (1901-1922).  That is, until they were suddenly overtaken by their crosstown rivals, the Yankees, who came to dominate baseball for the next 40 years, beginning with the arrival of Babe Ruth.

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Back in the Saddle Again — Putting the SME into the UI Which Equals UX

“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”  — Statement by Henry Ford in “My Life and Work”, by Henry Ford, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, 1922, page 72

The Henry Ford quote, which he made half-jokingly to his sales staff in 1909, is relevant to this discussion because the information sector has developed along the lines of the auto and many other industries.  The statement was only half-joking because Ford’s cars could be had in three colors.  But in 1909 Henry Ford had found a massive market niche that would allow him to sell inexpensive cars to the masses.  His competition wasn’t so much as other auto manufacturers, many of whom catered to the whims of the rich and more affluent members of society, but against the main means of individualized transportation at the time–the horse and buggy.  The color was not so much important to this market as was the need for simplicity and utility.

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