I was invited by TimeCamp to speak as one of their Top Project Management Influencers. I'm not sure if I am a top influencer, but it was a pleasure to speak with Kate about the paradigm we use to manage projects in our domain.
Over the years that domain includes, space, defense, enterprise IT, oil & gas, electric utilities, biopharma, insurance, embedded control systems, and others.
Here's the podcast
The principles I speak about in the podcast are summarized here, with a link to further details
Each of the Principles relies on measures of performance, planned activities, communication of those activities, and assessing physical percent complete toward the completion of those activities as planned.
To successfully implement the processes and practice needed for the principle, keeping track of the duration and effort of the work is a critical success factor. If we have a plan, we need to capture the actual effort and duration consumed to execute that plan. This is the basis of Closed Loop Control needed for any project to be successful. Without the feedback from a Time Keeping system, the actual efforts are not visible to the project management staff and the decision makers.
Any successful business, working in the project domain, needs to know how much effort, duration and cost has been consumed to date, compare that to the planned effort, duration, and cost to determine a variance for the project's performance. Only with the variance can corrective or preventive actions be taken to Keep the Project Green. †
TimeCamp is a product that does that.
† Keep the Program Green comes from a colleague in the space and defense business. We spend hours every month building program status reporting charts for internal reporting and the customer. These are called a five-by-five chart, showing all kinds of things about the performance of the program. Cost, schedule, budget, risk, technical performance, subcontractor performance. There is a bar chart for each of those items with time now, past performance, and projected future performance in Reed, Yellow, Green. If an item is not Green, this chart shows when we plan to Get to Green. One day he had a flash of brilliance. I have an idea, let's Keep the Program Green, then we wouldn't have to make up some cockamamy story about how we're going to Get Back to Green.
