cost management

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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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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