Life, Project Management, and Everything

Veteran’s Day 2016 and Civic Courage

Photo by the author of the Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Memorial in Boston

The memorial pictured that sits on Boston Common marks a bit of history that is but an echo of an earlier time to us, it affected me greatly when I actually saw it up close, for it spoke to me. I felt a kinship over time and space to those men who are represented in bronze and stone and what they might have been thinking as they marched in the cause of equality for all people, of self-government, and of a steady intolerance of extremism, ruthlessness, and violence in defense of a cause, which cause itself was morally repugnant; fear, no doubt, trepidation, hope, pride, and steely resolve to acquit themselves well when the time came for them to do their duty. It was a time where warfare was very close and personal.

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Loose (Data) Sinks Ships — OpSec for the Information Age

More than a year ago I attended an on-line seminar for businesses that do business with federal agencies. The speaker, in a refrain now heard quite often said: “There are two types of businesses; those who have been hacked by the Chinese and those that don’t know they have been hacked by the Chinese.” While there is a bit of hyperbole in that statement, it does make a valid point, and it is that all data with which we work in this new interconnected age of the internet and social media is vulnerable to being exposed to those who do not have a need to know if we don’t institute the right countermeasures.

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Technical Foul — It’s Time for TPI in EVM

For more than 40 years the discipline of earned value management (EVM) has gone through a number of changes in its descriptions, governance, and procedures. During that same time its community has been resistant to improvements in its methodology or to changes that extend its value when taking into account other methods that either augment its usefulness, or that potentially provide more utility in the area of performance management. This has been especially the case where it is suggested that EVM is just one of many methodologies that contribute to this assessment under a more holistic approach.

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New York Times Says Research and Development Is Hard…but maybe not

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).

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My Little Town — Orlando, Florida

Photo courtesy of Donna Pisano

Conference, workshop, and vacation season had slowed blogging of late. When it was over I had a number of things to post regarding interesting discussions and trends in the field of project management. Then on my return to my adopted home town of Orlando, the singer Christina Grimmie was shot and killed after performing a concert at the local music venue The Plaza Live–a beautiful young woman senselessly struck down by a cypher of a man. Then, early on Sunday my wife and I woke to the news of the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub. Both venues are less than two miles from our home.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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