Had lunch today with a senior Planning Manager. He's got 25 years managing the construction, launch and operations of spacecraft and their associated components.
He mentioned two critical attributes of a successful project
- Have the right people - this means hand picking them
- Manage the interfaces - this means pay close attention to the send and receive points of the project. Do this "manually" through face to face interaction.
The point of this little discussion is that automating project management processes is very dangerous. I never really gave it much thought, but the siren song of "fully integrated cost and schedule" has a deep hidden danger.
You can't (or are discouraged from) looking the person in the eye and asking - what did you mean when you said we're making progress on the this task, so I want 15% credit
With a fully automated system there is automated statusing, automated baseline changes, automated updates to milestones.
After 25 years of successfully flying complex machines to deep space, he still holds Monday afternoon "all hands" meetings to ask simple questions - what do you mean when you say "we're making progress."
