Herding Cats

Language of Program Success

When we speak of program management (or project management) "success" starts with speaking about DONE in units of measure meaningful to the program participants. This language is a powerful source of clarity or confusion. Learning to speak clearly, concisely, and... Read more →

Can Earned Value Save Government Projects?

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... Read more →

Questions That Need Answers

The second day of the PMI Earned Value Management World 2009 conference produced some thoughts. There were many presentations, some good, some better. But during one presentation it came to me that all the "whining" about how poorly projects are... Read more →

Self Inflicted Wounds

I'm speaking and attending the EVM World 2009 conference in Florida. This is a gathering of 500 or so Earned Value and Cost Estimating specialist discussing the theory and practice of Earned Value in a variety of domains. These domains... Read more →

Mind Mapping and the Work Breakdown Structure

Gantt Head has an article about the use of Mind Mapping (free login required) in project management. Mind Mapping is a powerful paradigm for capturing and organizing information that is hierarchical in nature. Projects are primarily hierarchical, starting with the... Read more →

Using Earned Value to Manage the Program

There is a discussion on LinkedIn Earned Value Management group about how to use EV to manage a program in the enterprise IT domain. The domain of course is the Federal Government and all the reporting around the growing failure... Read more →

We All Know Multitasking Is Bad - Now What?

There's been a rash of post around the notion that Multi-Tasking is bad on projects. Nice restating the obvious. Now what can be done about this? The first step is the acknowledge there is a problem, and search for a... Read more →

The Project Management Team

Craig Brown described his response to questions about technical teams and the management of technical teams. This got me thinking about how I would respond to the same questions from the point of view of Project or Program Management. First... Read more →

College of Performance Management

The Project Management Institute's College of Performance Management has a periodic newsletter The Measurement News. This month's issue is has several articles about PMBOK and its Earned Value content. The To Complete Performance Index (TCPI) is very useful for IT... Read more →

Specifications

For all of us looking for specifications and documents that are usually buried in some web site or worse, available for a price, there's a source - EverySpec. Some things that were only available at IHS can be found there.... Read more →

Project Management Blogs

I subscribe to a 100 or so blogs through Google Reader. There are a few I read all the time. One is Eight to Late, by Kailash Await. I too had a another life in physics - doing experimental work... Read more →

Why I Don't Like Stage Gates

The term "stage gate," is popular in manufacturing and many project management discussions. This term along with "Milestone" is one of those vague references meant to indicate progress. We made it through the Design Stage Gate We passed the first... Read more →

You Know You're Managing a Project When - V2

When some say we're doing agile project management, or "our software development method includes project management," ask the following to determine if you're actually doing project management A project charter has been developed - do we know what done looks... Read more →

DoD Acquisition Reform Focused on Earned Value

Paul Solomon's web site is a wealth of "breaking news" on topics on interest to Program Planning and Controls and Earned Value. At the site is testimony by the Deputy Desecrate of Defense, Lynn on Acquisition Reform. While there is... Read more →

Undercorrelated WBS Elements Means Understated Cost Risk

The current issue of the National Estimator, The Society of Cost Estimating and Analysis, monthly magazine has an eye opening article titled "Correlating Work Breakdown Structure Elements." A Key aspect of cost risk is correlation between work breakdown structure (WBS)... Read more →

Increasing the Probability of Success

Hal Macomber's blog Reforming Project Management - asked the question "does reliability matter?" Being reliable is necessary but not sufficient for project success. The defense industry learned to classify those "necessary but not sufficient" attributes into a larger model. The... Read more →

Risk Management

There have been several posted recently about "management of risk." Many times risk gets mixed up with issues. The best place to start to understand how risk management is performed, is to look at how it is performed in the... Read more →