About Teamwork

This quote says it all

"By design and talent, we were a team of specialists, and like a team of specialists in any field, our performance depended both on individual excellence and how well we worked together. None of us had to strain to understand that we had to complement each other specialties; it was simply a fact."

Bill Russell
Boston Celtics

Confidence and a matter of range

It's all a matter of confidence: confidence in statistical terms is the cumulative probability over a range of values.  It's a little more handy for project managers because it only expresses an approximation and a judgement, and both of these ideas allow for some leeway.

Using a bell-shaped Normal (probability density) distribution as an example--and, because of the Central Limit Theorem, this is a reasonable example to look at-- risk managers calculate cumulative by summing the height x width area under the curve.  In the figure, we see the so-called "S" curve superimposed on the distribution.  The "S" curve is the cumulative probability.

Confidence is an expression of cumulative probability over a range.  In the example shown, the confidence is "outcome will be equal to, or less than, 4 in 81% of the trials".  Obviously, the 81% is calculated by subtracting 19% from 100%.  The "precision" here is just an artifact of the tool.  The judgement is about the "80 - 20" rule, and the figure is an illustration.

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Quantitative Methods -- Quote for thinkers

The original statement of the principle: "garbage in .... garbage out"

Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour prom peascods, so pages of formula will not get a definite result out of loose data.

- Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, Volume 25, 1869, Lord Kelvin, when speaking of the calculations of the age of the earth

That pesky schedule variance thing

Ever once in a while the argument comes up about EV -SV, the schedule variance in the earned value management (EVM) practice.  Hopefully, everyone reading this knows EV is earned value and PV is planned value, but some know it as Work Performed (WP) - Work Scheduled (WS), or as the DoD Gold card presents it: BCWP - BCWS.

Any way you write it, it's more useful to understand it as a value variance.  After all, it is the difference between two values--earned and planned--denominated in dollars; neither are a cost--both are a value measurement.

The nice thing about thinking about this as a value variance rather than a schedule variance is that the thought is consistent at all the boundary conditions and points.  One boundary point is where EV reaches PV--all the planned value is earned.  The EV - SV calculation is now $0.  As a value variance: no conceptual problem: all the value has been earned.

As a schedule variance, we have to think like a pretzel to explain how the variance can be zero under two of three boundary conditions: the project finishes early, the project finishes on-time, the project finishes late.  In all three cases, the variance can be zero  (if all value is earned) but the three conditions are really quite different vis a vis schedule variance.  Zero schedule variance doesn't compute; they share only one attribute: the value variance is zero.

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Studying Engineering Before They Can Spell It

Silly me! I have not been keeping up with the fact that engineering education now begins in kindergarten, at least in some schools around the country. And, this has been going on for a while! Who knew?
In a recent article, I was pleased to learn that in New York, for example, ".....Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum."

Of course, now aware of this phenonenom, I see from a web search that K-12 engineering is all ove the place.  As an old wreck from Georgia Tech, I say: amen!

Photo credit: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Software Human Capital

Software human capital is the theme of the May/June 2010 "Crosstalk: the journal of defense software engineering". Five essays in this issue raise interesting questions and offer some interesting ideas on managing and utilizing human resources in software projects.
One that caught my eye was "From Projects to People: Shifting the Software Acquisition Paradigm"
After reciting a litnay of defense acquisition problems, the authors arrive at the conclusion that more talented people are needed: Here's the main idea:

Establishing a National Systems Engineering Laboratory

Quality and schedule could be met (at least within a consistent cost and schedule margin) if we fundamentally shift our acquisition paradigm: from program-by-program cost and schedule management to a focus on the quality of people used to feed our engineering teams. This would be accomplished by establishing what we call a National Systems Engineering Laboratory (NSEL). ..... The NSEL would also be cooperatively staffed with selected personnel from our universities, federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), and government services.

There might be some merit to a national effort to build more and better system engineering; perhaps a DARPA like laboratory for this would help stimulate the effort.  Perhaps the author's have an idea worth talking about.

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Complexity and Complicated

Complicated, says Dan Ward, is unnecessary complexity.  How does this work for you?