aerospace and defense

Ch- Ch- Changes–What I Learned at the NDIA IPMD Meeting and Last Thoughts on POGO DCMA

Hot Topics at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Integrated Program Management Division (NDIA-IPMD)

For those of you who did not attend, or who have a passing interest in what is happening in the public sphere of DoD acquisition, the NDIA IPMD meeting held last week was a great importance. Here are the highlights.

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Frame by Frame: Framing Assumptions and Project Success or Failure

When we wake up in the morning we enter the day with a set of assumptions about ourselves, our environment, and the world around us.  So too when we undertake projects.  I’ve just returned from the latest NDIA IPMD meeting in Washington, D.C. and the most intriguing presentation at the meeting was given by Irv Blickstein regarding a RAND root cause analysis of major program breaches.  In short, a major breach in the cost of a program is defined by the Nunn-McCurdy amendment that was first passed in 1982, in which a major defense program breaches its projected baseline cost by more than 15%.

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Synchroncity — What is proper schedule and cost integration?

Much has been said about the achievement of schedule and cost integration (or lack thereof) in the project management community.  Much of it consists of hand waving and magic asterisks that hide the significant reconciliation that goes on behind the scenes.  From an intellectually honest approach that does not use the topic as a means of promoting a proprietary solution is that authored by Rasdorf and Abudayyeah back in 1991 entitled, “Cost and Schedule Control Integration: Issues and Needs.”

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I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction) — When Software Tools Go Bad

Another article I came across a couple of weeks ago that my schedule prevented me from highlighting was by Michelle Symonds at PM Hut entitled “5 Tell-Tale Signs That You Need a Better Project Management Tool.”  According to Ms. Symonds, among these signs are:

a.  Additional tools are needed to achieve the intended functionality apart from the core application;

b.  Technical support is poor or nonexistent;

c.  Personnel in the organization still rely on spreadsheets to extend the functionality of the application;

d.  Training on the tool takes more time than training the job;

e.  The software tool adds work instead of augmenting or facilitating the achievement of work.

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I Can See Clearly Now (The Risk Is Gone) — Managing and Denying Risk in PM

I just returned from a project management conference, and among a very distinguished venue of project management specialists, one of the presentations that really impressed me by its refreshingly candid approach was given by Dave Burgess of the U. S. Navy Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) entitled “Integrated Project Management: ‘A View from the Front Line’.”  The charts from his presentation will be posted on the site (link in the text on the first line).  Among the main points that I took from his presentation are:

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