One of the lessons learned from our recent proposal efforts (besides having really fast machine, nice 19" plasma panels, and good 11 by 17 color printers) is that you must ruthlessly adhere to the following:
- Decompose the work from the top down - this means define the Program Events, Significant Accomplishments, and Accomplishment Criteria from the top. This is obvious at first, especially from all the training courses, Air Force pamphlets and internal corporate guide books. But ruthlessly means without regard to the needs of others. Without this structure in place several bad things happen, not the least of which you start applying task level detail without understanding the consequences
- Managing the collection of work starts logically with the WBS. But this falls apart very fast in the Integrated Product and Process Development (IPPD) world without careful thought to how the work, the tasks and the partners will be coded. There hasn't been a WBS invented that stays structure for long in the IPPD world. Work moves around all the time, between partners, between WBS elements and between system architecture changes. In our Systems of Systems (SoS) approach this is even more difficult, since cycles define the work boundaries.
- You must have a development programmer on the team. Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and straight Visual Studio development has saved the hour and day many times over the past month. Excel is a powerful tool, but Project and Database applications need more powerful tools.
- Backup often. Never trust the server backups - they take a day to restore in a large corporation. Having CDs, memory sticks, multiple machines, personal laptops, etc.
- Have one and only one person work on the "style" of projects. This keeps the confusion down. Have one and only one person work on the structural architecture of the projects again avoiding confusion.
I'm going to write a full lessons learned when we're rested from our efforts. But for now the best advice on any large complex project management effort is "stay focused, keep it simple, build incrementally, and never ever give up.