Been attending conferences and meetings of late and came upon a discussion of the means of reducing data streams while leveraging Moore’s Law to provide more, better data. During a discussion with colleagues over lunch they asked if asking for more detailed data would provide greater insight. This led to a discussion of the qualitative differences in data depending on what information is being sought. My response to more detailed data was to respond: “well there has to be a pony in there somewhere.” This was greeted by laughter, but then I finished the point: more detailed data doesn’t necessarily yield greater insight (though it could and only actually looking at it will tell you that, particularly in applying the principle of KDD). But more detailed data that is based on a hierarchical structure will, at the least, provide greater reliability and pinpoint areas of intersection to detect areas of risk manifestation that is otherwise averaged out–and therefore hidden–at the summary levels.
(more…)schedule management
Ace of Base(line) — A New Paper on Building a Credible PMB
Glen Alleman, a leading consultant in program management (who also has a blog that I follow), Tom Coonce of the Institute for Defense Analyses, and Rick Price of Lockheed Martin, have jointly published a new paper in the College of Performance Management’s Measureable News entitled “Building A Credible Performance Measurement Baseline.”
The elements of their proposal for constructing a credible PMB, from my initial reading, are as follows:
(more…)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).
(more…)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%.
(more…)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.”
(more…)
Life, Project Management, and Everything 