What Does Done Look Like In Units Of Measure, Meaningful To The Decision Maker?
- Know where we are going by defining “done” that will arrive at some point in the future.
- In this future, Stakeholders acquire the Capability to accomplish the Mission or Agency Goal, by answering:
- What capabilities do we need to possess for success?
- What will our stakeholders do with these capabilities to create value or fulfill a mission?
- What are the Measures of Effectiveness and Performance of these capabilities in units meaningful to the decision makers?
- What is the sequence for the delivery of each capability and what are the incremental increases in the maturity of each capability needed to deliver value to the stakeholders?
What Is The Plan To Reach Done On The Needed Date For The Needed Cost?
- Have some kind of plan to get to where you are going.
- This plan can be simple, or complex.
- The fidelity of the plan depends on the tolerance for risk by the users of the plan and supplier of the solution.
- The plan answers the question?
How long are we willing to wait before we find out we are late?
And what are the corrective or preventive actions needed to stay on plan?
What Resources Do We Need To Reach Done As Planned?
- Resources
- Staff, with correct skills and experience
- Funding, to cover the period of the contract (risk adjusted)
- Facilities, for the staff to perform their job
- Tools, to enable work to be performed
- Time, from a risk adjusted assessment of the schedule for the work
- Planning the resources starts with a Resource Management Plan.
- The Demand Forecast
- Existing or Proposed Resources
- Planning Assumptions
- Future Resources
- Integrated Resource Plan
What Impediments Will Be Encountered On The Way To Done?
- Identify the uncertainties to progress along the way to the destination come in three forms.
- Natural Variation (Aleatory)
- The protection is cost, schedule, and technical margin to absorb these variances
- Foreseen Uncertainty (Epistemic)
- These uncertainties can be bought down or retired
- Unforeseen Uncertainty (Ontological)
- These cannot be identified during the planning process.
- When they occur a new plan is needed
- Chaos
- These are unknown unknowns
- But only unknowable is the reason to not search for these uncertainties
- Natural Variation (Aleatory)
How Will We Measure Physical Percent Complete On The Path To Done?
- Have some way to measure your planned progress, not just our progress to date of progress to plan.
- Progress to Plan is measured in units of physical percent complete.
- Does the outcome of the project meet the needs of the stakeholder?
- What capability does the stakeholder now have that wasn’t there before?
- Does this new capability provide measurable value?
- If so, what is the evidence that this value was derived from the delivered products or services?
Using these Five Immutable Principles of Managing Other People's Money We Must Always Remember
There is No Principle of Managerial Finance, Probabilistic Decision-Making, or Microeconomics of Software Development, where in the presence of uncertainty - both reducible or irreducible that creates risk - a credible decision can be made, using scarce resources, while spending other people's money, with Estimating the outcome of that decision and its impact on the probability of project success.
