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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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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Life, Project Management, and Everything 