I'm attending, along with many 100's of others, the PMI EVM World 2009 conference in Naples Florida. (The proceedings should be available on the College of Performance Management's web site.) During a conversation with one of the attendees, he expressed his frustration with how government (I'll assume US Federal government) projects are poorly run at times.
The speaker works in international construction which certainly has a less than stellar track record of project success. Ignoring the built in inefficiencies of the largest organization on the planet for the moment, I asked "what is the alternative?" The answer I seemed to hear was "well I don't have one; my role is to point out the problem." His clearer answer was "earned value," but that of course is not the solution or the alternative. EV simply reports poor past performance in a timely manner and in units of measure of money, not time.
Pointing out the problem is the the easy part. We all recognize the problem; it's the answer that is elusive. One speaker at the conference stated government projects are different in many ways, some obvious some subtle. This struck a chord with me. They're different but in a way I had not thought of. They have do profit incentive (obvious actually) in the way a commercial IT project does (and ERP deployment), or a commercial constriction project (a high rise or shopping mall).
More important they're "emergent" in exactly the ways agile proponents suggest (but with less success). They are emergent on the defense side because the enemy is changing, the requirements are changing, the technology is changing. They are emerging on the civil side because of the political influences on the project. I've worked one city and one state project. If you think your commercial project has "politics," city projects have real politics!
It might be conjectured that in the absence of a profit motive the behavior of the system is inefficient. That is actually a tautology as well as a restatement of the obvious.
Leaving us with the unanswered question - "what's the alternative?"
What projects should the government - any government undertake? Can these projects be managed in ways different than commercial projects given they are spending the public's money? Is there any evidence that any alternative process than the ones being used today are more effective. By evidence I mean something beyond personal opinion?
I earn my living "working" government projects at NASA and DoD. Our answer is to make all attempts to improve the performance of those projects in what small ways we can.
Earned Value "can" and I emphasize "maybe can" provide actionable information to the Program Manager. But EV only is not a viable solution to increasing the Probability of Program Success (PoPS). http://www.afmc.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123020393 is a short article on the broader tool set of approaches to increasing the PoPS. Earned value is one of those. But as my paper at EVM World suggests, CPI/SPI are driving in the rearview mirror using past months data with data measures in Dollars. The units of measure for the evidence produced by the actions and documents in this post are part of the attempts to increase the PoPS. Look on Google for the PoPS (Probability of Program Success Air Force Army Navy) concept to see if it adds light to the conversation. I'll post the EVM World paper next week.
The real issue at hand is how to turn all our opinions into some type of actionable outcome, with evidence that those outcomes are beneficial to the stakeholders in some unit of measure meaningful to them? Politics aside, For DoD programs the stakeholder is the war fighter. As a former combatant in Vietnam, I might suggest the units of measure are defined by them, not the non–combatants attending conferences in Florida.
