One common concept in project management is the three independent elements of a project:
- People
- Processes
- Technology
The people side is being hashed out in previous posts. Processes of PM are debated all the time and technology for managing projects is a hot topic as well.
There is a orthogonal dimension here. The mathematics of projects. This includes
- Cost models
- Schedule models
- Risk models
Models for people are essentially intractable. The Complex Adaptive Systems paradigm has no closed form solutions to any of the underlying math that has any relation what so ever to the activities and outcomes of project management. At the moment CAS is a sociology paradigm with some possibilities for application.
But the cost, schedule, and risk models do have tractable forms that are applied in many domains. The sources of materials for these applications include:
- Journal of Cost Analysis and Parametrics from the Society of Cost Estimating and Analysis and International Society of Parametric Analysis
- Journal of the International Council on Systems Engineering
- The Association for the Advancement of Cost Estimating
- NASA Cost Estimating Handbook 2008
- JPL's Parametric Cost Estimating Handbook
- NASA Systems Engineering Handbook
The point of these references is that the process of managing projects is well developed in other fields. Fields that include software intensive products and services. Projects that have emerging requirements, unstable funding, and all the attributes found in commercial IT projects.
The guidance developed in these domains provides the discipline for the teams to move beyond just software development and into system development. One of the primary failings in IT projects is the lack of understanding of the systems impact of decisions. This is not systems in the sense of hardware and software, but systems int he sense of "Systems Engineering."
