In the continuing conversation with vocal critic of government contracts, I've come to the conclusion there is a personality type that loves to point out the obvious problems in the world - in this case management of government programs. While this approach makes for good forum fodder, it is pretty much worhtless in the actual world of a program manager.
This approach is supported at times by conference presentations that restate the obvious. The conversation - of sorts - started with the NASA PM Challanger presentation Mega Project Estimates - A History of Denial, Glenn Butts. The PM Challenge conference has many useful items, and sometimes not so useful.
The referenced presentation is one of those surveys of the wreckage from poor management approaches. This approach of course only shows the "bad" projects and fails - intentionally it seems - to include successes for statisical comparison and calibration. In the NASA world there are many success as there are in DoD, DOE, and other government agencies.
The orginal poster (the vocal critica with lots of titles behind his name) usually starts the converation about how poorly government projects are run, with overruns and waste. Yes this is many times the case. And the reference to the Butts presentation is only one of many stating points.
But here's where the conversation goes in the ditch:
- We know there are problems. That's obvious. In fact it's so obvious that restating the obvious is now considered a school-boy approach. "Every school boy knows" was a quote in some famous physics book I had in grad school.
- But now that we know projects are troubles - cost, schedule, technical performance - what is the suggested solution?
Deafenng silence is the response. Even the Butts presentation is silent beyond restating the obvious solutions. Yes we know we need to get better estimates. We know the initial estimates are flawed to the point of being uunusable. But what are we doing about it?
This is a common problem in all project domains. It is part of the process. What the real problem is the politics of projects is the source of the problem. Not the lack of credible estimates. Just the opposite. Credible estimates abound. Having those credible estimates become the baseline estimates is a political problem. By political I mean "low price wins," "best value wins," "Firm Fixed Price contracts," annual funding cycle allocations of limited money. Things like that drive estimates that are not credible.
But here's the real problem. When a someone speaks about all the problems in the government contracting domain, those same problems are in the commercial world as well. It turns out when someone has a axe to grind - anti-government politics - it's hard to discuss solutions. Because solutions then remove to reason for the anti-government axe.
It's much too easy to sit on the side lines and point out the problems in the world. There are certainly enough to go around. It is much harder - and many times simply too hard - to proffer solutions to those problems. And even much much harder to put those proffered solutions to work in real projects in an attempt to improve the probability of success.
Using the College Football Analogy
So no more "arm chair quarter backs," get up off your duff, put on the pads, read the play book, and start running the plays on the field. Get banged around by the opposing team, support your team mates and quit bitching about how bad the team is playing the game.
Then maybe something will improve. Then again, maybe not. Maybe it's the role of the arm chair quarter backs to just sit and point out the flaws in others.
