I'm assembling a training briefing for an upcoming Integrated Baseline Review for a client. This will be a 200 to 300 page Power Point briefing with narrated slides in the standard style of our defense practice.
During the research phase, I came across a great site for guideance in assesing the credibility of the program's plans.
Independent Program Assessment Office. This is what is many times missing from major commerical IT enterprise projects. On the Cost and Schedule analysis section of the home page, is a set of processes that can be applied to any complex program with inherent risk.
Many authors who speak about the "nonsense things" that project managers do, should point them to this site. These would include:
- Having deterministic schedules and cost to levels of detail not physically possible,
- Capturing estimates by asking simple and many times simple minded questions without the underlying statistical assessment of the confidence in those numbers,
- Not having a Plan-B for all critical activities,
- Not understanding that making trade offs between cost, schedule, and technical performance is a Ponzi scheme, and finally,
- Confusing effort with results, by failing to define what done looks like in units of measure meaningful to all the participants.
