The amount of "restating the obvious" in project management literature, blogs, and commercial web sites is growing. PMI is part of this as are the numerous commercial sites, mostly aimed at managing IT projects.
I'm preparing an abstract for the upcoming EVM World 2010. My session editor is a principle at a Washington DC consulting firm, specializing in EV and Cost management. The leaders of that firm are household names in the cost analysis and forecasting business fro NASA and DoD.
My editor is very strict in pushing me to move beyond the obvious. My topic of "getting back to GREEN" is a critical activity on every aerospace and defense program we work. If everything was going right, they would not need to hire us. Rarely does everything go right of course.
Don't Restate the Obvious
We all know people skills are needed. We all know we need a plan and a schedule. We all know we must have a risk management plan integrated with the schedule. Blah, blah, blah.
These are all necessary but not sufficient conditions for increasing the Probability of Program Success (PoPS). But these are rarely executed properly.
What's the reason for project's being "off GREEN?" Here's my opinion of the bowels of a large DoD contract where I'm working the re-baselining efforts.
- We don't think about project management from the system engineering point of view. Program Architecture is equally as important as Technical Architecture. The successful programs have a programmatic process flow that describes how the technical components will increase in maturity, how risk will be retired, and how the program as a "system" will recognize that progress and being made.
- We are missing the direct accountability for Work Package performance as a group. We have weekly Earned Value, we have weekly and sometimes daily stand ups, we have every tool know to man for communicating, visualizing, testing, developing, and doing anything else to the product we need to do. But they rarely operate as a "system of systems." In the successful programs (that don't need us), all these elements are integrated. Sometimes seamlessly, sometimes the stitches are BIG along the seams. More Frankenstein like than plastic surgeon like.
- We fail to predefine measures of progress are needed to recognize physical percent complete is being reached. The post hoc assessment of progress is the "kiss of death" for any non-trivial program. "How will I recognize success when it walks through the door?" The plan has to tell me this or I won't recognize it.
With all the tools, people skills, processes, and gadgets, we must perform the activities above if we are ever to move beyond the obvious marketing shatter of project management processes and training.
