project planning

Shake it Out – Embracing the Future in Program Management – Part One: Program and Project Management in the Public Interest

I heard the song from which I derived the title to this post sung by Florence and the Machine and was inspired to sit down and write about what I see as the future in program management.

Thus, my blogging radio silence has ended as I begin to process and share my observations and essential achievements over the last couple of years.

My company—the conduit that provides the insights I share here—is SNA Software LLC. We are a small, veteran-owned company and we specialize in data capture, transformation, contextualization and visualization. We do it in a way that removes significant effort in these processes, ensures reliability and trust, to incorporate off-the-shelf functionality that provides insight, and empowers the user by leveraging the power of open systems, especially in program and project management.

Program and Project Management in the Public Interest

There are two aspects to the business world that we inhabit: commercial and government; both, however, usually relate to some aspect of the public interest, which is our forte.

There are also two concepts about this subject to unpack.

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Ground Control from Major Tom — Breaking Radio Silence: New Perspectives on Project Management

Since I began this blog I have used it as a means of testing out and sharing ideas about project management, information systems, as well to cover occasional thoughts about music, the arts, and the meaning of wisdom.

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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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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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