Herding Cats

What Does $35 Billion Look Like

Here's the binders for the EADS proposal for the KC-X tanker. The award is worth $35B over its period of performance. Photo source, The DEW Line This is probably the largest award in recent years - no matter who wins... Read more →

Elements of Project Controls

The most successful method of "project controls" is Earned Value Management (EVM). There are 32 criteria for a fully compliance Earned Value System in the government contracting world. But these 32 criteria are not needed for success when applying Earned... Read more →

Quote of the Day - Complexity

“Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.” - Laurence J. Peter When there is mention of the complexity of something like Earned Value, it makes me... Read more →

Physical Percent of Planned Progress

Jack Vinson posted a really good comment about Measuring Progress. I made a quick comment, but this is important enough for some more details. The key beneficial outcomes of a well implemented Earned Value Management system is: The planned performance... Read more →

Defense Industry and Scrum

The current issue of National Defense has a reader comment on a previous article about the software development issues of Joint Strike Fighter. Dr. Polk mentions in his reader response that Scrum is a way to improve software development. The... Read more →

Risk Matrix

The risk matrix approaches described in PMBOK® and similar sources of risk management information multiply the probability of occurrence of the risk with the impact from the risk to produce a risk index. The example matrix from PMBOK® is From... Read more →

Measuring Progress - What Can We Use?

A previous post about the supposed difficulties in calculating Earned Value brought a comment that maybe the calculations weren't difficult but rather extensive. Extensive seems a bit of a stretch. The first question though, the inverted question actually is: How... Read more →

Four Archetypes of a Program Management Office (PMO)

Several years ago Mark Mullaly defined the 4 types of a Program Management Office. There is a discussion on Josh Nankivel's site asking about PMO best practices. Here's Mark's matrix. Scorekeeper Monitor and report progress of project portfolio Program and... Read more →

How Not to be a "Bad Manager"

I enjoy reading Derek Huether's blog, He's got insightful comments on the people side of managing projects - not my strength. But his post Social Constraints for Your Meetings, triggered a gut reaction. I've worked in a variety of domains,... Read more →

How can you know you're headed to the Ditch?

I have a business friend from Houston Texas, who has a great saying about projects, in his best Southern Louisiana accent. You know you're in the ditch when the weeds are hitting the windshield. Get back on the road and... Read more →