Lately there have been several voices that resonant with my World View. Ronald Regan's "trust but verify" is a phrase many times forgotten in our project management and process improvement world. I came across Carol Deckers through a twitter reference from Dan Galorath. Dan provides estimating tools used in our aerospace and defense world and other places like enterprise IT.
The notion of "trust but verify" is close to show me you can produce what you claim you can produce. In the management processes applied to our programs, we start with the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is essentially based on "trust but verify."
- We have a Validated Earned Value Management System (EVMS). The validation is provided by the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA). This validation is the basis of the trust to the customer (the federal givernment) that the numbers provided to them (the customer) each month come from the people, processes, and tools that have been verified. But even with that there is a surveillance process that verifies this trust.
- When the defined capabilities of the product or service produced by the program are agreed on, the Contract Officer (CO) and the contractors management have a "trust but verify" arrangement, with periodic Technical Interchange Meetings (TIM) and periodic Integrated Program Management meetings to "verify" that the trust placed in the contractor to do what is planned to be done is there.
So we're back to the core issue
When an initiative is suggested we need to Trust there is a credible outcome. Otherwise, we'll be spending all our time worried that it won't work. But this trust has to be based on something real:
- It's been done before
- It has references in our domain and context
- The outcomes from the past performance are close to what we're looking for
- The person or firm has a track record of success in this are - this is call past performance
And we need to verify
- There are working examples of the process and its outcome
- Those working examples are close enough to what we want that we can "trust" it can be made to work here
- The numbers for the stated benefits can be verified in ways that give us confidence they are actually true.
This is the source of my constant suspicions around 2.0 and 3.0 effort from individuals with ancedotal experiences and a good publisher. This happens about once a year for the past decade or so. First was Project Management 2.0. The old project management processes were failing. Turns out the project failures for the most part come from failing to follow the old project management processes. I loved one of the suggestion of PM 2.0 that social media was the answer to better project management. Yea let's manage out projects with Twitter. This BTW is the antithesis of agile, where face-to-face is the starting point.
Then the hordes of new and innovative business and change management processes. SoI always start with Beyond the Hype approach to assessing the suggestion. I know some will say you're way to conservative here, You'll never make progress with that attitude. Well we manage other peoples money when managing our programs, so yep you're right.
