It's the conference season again. I spoke at the PMI Denver Symposium (Programmatic Risk Management in 5 Easy Pieces), went to 3 days of the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, I'm speaking next week at the Lean conference here in Denver (What Lean can Learn from Systems Engineering), and ending the season by speaking at the PMI College of Scheduling in Chicago (Building the Performance Measurement Baseline).
In these venues I've learned several things:
- Gene Kranz and Jim Lovell are very good speakers. Their keynote at the Denver PMI drew a standing ovation. We got our pictures taken with them and will be posted when they arrive in email. It was the standard story, from Gene's book Failure is not an Option, Jim's counter statement was "success is our only option." I like both quotes. They had another quote that works for me as well.
- There are three kinds of people. Those who make things happen, those who watch it happen, and those who ask "what happened."
- The famous quote "Houston we have a problem," often used and often played in the movies, is much more powerful from the real recording.
- At PMI Denver people were actually interested in programmatic risk. The presentation will be posted on the company web site this week.
- At the Space Symposium, I never saw some many 1, 2, and 3 stars walking around outside the Pentagon. Loads of goodies and posters only available "at the show", some old friends reconnecting, and lots of students on "student day" walking around eyes wide at the huge trade show booths. Some with full size propulsion systems. Cool machines, videos of cool machines and lots of asking "what do you do?" "How can you help us with our problems." Good food to boot.
- The Lean conference will be interesting. Some "extreme" proponents of agile and lean software development. My panel has a whole spectrum of users, plus a few "thought leaders." In the idea my pitch is almost all of lean and agile is actually good systems engineering. SE as taught in the SE schools. Like the one I went to (USC, since we all worked at TRW), but Stevens Institute, Case Western, MIT as well. All SE schools.
- The Chicago talk is on Performance Measurement Baseline, which is the life blood of any complex project. Or any non-trivial project is a better way to put it. If you don't know what done looks like, have some sense how long it will take, or possibly how much it will cost, then you're not doing project management. You might be doing something else, but it ain't project management. PMB establish the cost, schedule, and technical performance upfront. From there changes are made - for all the right reasons. But these changes are also changes to the PMB. Too many changes and you've got the re-baseline. It's called being accountable for the outcomes. This paper and presentation will be available at the end of May.
The next cycle of conferences is in the fall. PMI Global here in Denver, EVMS World in DC are two we're speaking at.
The final impression
I thought I was pretty jaded, having been in the trenches for 25 years or so, listening to all the blather about "how I saved the world," or "how I can save the world, if you'll just suspend reality for a bit." But I was like a school boy around Kranz and Lovell. Standing in line like all the other "school boys" for a hand shake and picture. You'd thought I was a new grad at my first company picnic meeting Simon Ramo (the R in TRW) himself. The pictures and video of Apollo 13 with them working their jobs then and now telling us about it 30 years later was actually inspirational to this 61 year old. I didn't even finish my free breakfast at the A&D Breakfast.
