NAVAIR

Just returned from attending the National Defense Industrial Association’s Integrated Program Management Division (NDIA IPMD) quarterly meeting.  This is an opportunity for both industry and government to share common concerns and issues regarding program management, as well as share expertise and lessons learned.

This is one among a number of such forums that distinguishes the culture in aerospace and defense in comparison to other industry verticals.  For example, in the oil and gas industry the rule of thumb is to not share such expertise across the industry, except in very general terms through venues such as the Project Management Institute, since the information is considered proprietary and competition sensitive.  I think, as a result, that the PM discipline suffers for this lack of cross pollination of ideas, resulting in an environment where, in IT infrastructure, the approach is toward customization and stovepipes, resulting in a situation where solutions tend to be expensive, marked by technological dead ends and single point failures, a high rate of IT project failure, and increased expense.

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:

a.  The time from development to production of an aircraft has increased significantly from the 1990s.  The reason for this condition is implicit in the way that PM is executed.  More on this below in items d and e.

b.  FY 2015 promises an extremely tight budget outlook for DoD.  From my view given his chart it is almost as if 2015 is the budgetary year that Congress forgot.  Supplemental budgets somewhat make up for the shortfalls prior to and after FY 2015, but the next FY is the year that the austerity deficit-hawk pigeons come home to roost.  From a PM perspective this represents a challenge to program continuity and sustainability.  It forces choices within program that may leave the program manager with a choice of the lesser of two evils.

c.  Beyond the standard metrics provided by earned value management that it is necessary for program and project managers to identify risks, which requires leading indicators to inform future progress.

This is especially important given the external factors of items a and b above.  Among his specific examples, Mr. Burgess demonstrated the need for integration of schedule and cost in the development of leading indicators.  Note that I put schedule ahead of cost in interpreting his data, and in looking at his specific examples there was an undeniable emphasis on the way in which schedule drives performance, given that it is a measure of the work that needs to be accomplished with (hopefully) an assessment of the resources necessary to accomplish the tasks in that work.  For example, Mr. Burgess demonstrated the use of bow waves to illustrate that the cumulative scope of the effort as the program ramps over time up will overcome the plan if execution is poor.  This is a much a law of physics as any mathematical proof.  No sky-hooks exist in real life.

From my perspective in PM, cost is a function of schedule.  All too often I have seen cases where the project management baseline (PMB) is developed apart from and poorly informed by the integrated master schedule (IMS).  This is not only foolhardy it is wrong.  The illogic of doing so should be self-evident but the practice persists.  It mostly exists because of the technological constraints imposed by the PM IT systems being stovepiped, which then drive both practice and the perception of what industry views is possible.

Thus, this is not an argument in favor of the status quo, it is, instead, an argument to dump the IT tool vendor refusing to update their products whose only interest is to protect market share and keep their proprietary solution sticky.  The concepts of sunk costs vs. prospective costs are useful in this discussion.  Given the reality of the tight fiscal environment in place and greater constraints to come, the program and project manager is facing the choice of paying recurring expenses for outdated technologies to support their management systems, or selecting and deploying new ones that will reduce their overheads and provide better and quicker information.  This allows them to keep people who, despite the economic legend that robots are taking our jobs, still need to make decisions in effectively managing the program and project.  It takes a long time and a lot of money to develop an individual with the skills necessary to manage a complex project of the size discussed by Mr. Burgess, while software technology generations average two years.  I’d go with keeping the people and seeking new, innovative technologies on a regular basis, since the former will always be hard and expensive (if done right) and the latter for the foreseeable future will continue on a downward cost slope.  I’ll expand on this in a later post.

d.  There is a self-reinforcing dysfunctional systemic problem that contributes to the condition described in item “a,” which is the disconnect between most likely estimates of the cost of a system and the penchant for the acquisition system to award based on a technically acceptable approach that is the lowest bid.  This encourages unrealistic expectations in forming the plan once the contract is awarded, which eventually is modified, through various change rationales, that tend to bring the total scope back to the original internal most-likely estimate.  Thus, Procuring Contracting Officers (PCOs) are allowing contractors to buy-in, a condition contrary to contracting guidance, and it is adversely affecting both budget and program planning.

e.  That all too often program managers spend time denying risk in lieu of managing risk.  By denying risk, program and project managers focus on a few elements of performance that they believe give them an indication of how their efforts are performing.  This perception is reinforced by the limited scope of the information looked at by senior personnel in the organization in their reports.  It is then no surprise that there are “surprises” when reality catches up with the manager.

It is useful to note the difference between program and project management in the context of the A&D vertical.  Quite simply, in this context, a program manager is responsible for all of the elements of the system being deployed.  For the U.S. Navy this includes the entire life-cycle of the system, including the logistics and sustainment after deployment.  Project management in this case includes one element of the system; for example, development and production of a radar, though there are other elements of the program in addition to the radar.  My earlier posts on the ACA program–as opposed to the healthcare.gov site–is another apt example of these concepts in practice.

Thus, program managers, in particular, need information on all of the risks before them.  This would include not only cost and schedule risk, which I would view as project management level indicators, but also financial and technical risk at the program level.  Given the discussions this past week, it is apparent that our more familiar indicators, while useful, require a more holistic set of views that both expand and extend our horizon, while keeping that information “actionable.”  This means that our IT systems used to manage our business systems require more flexibility and interoperability in supporting the needs of the community.