Root Cause

It's "Military Officer" week here at "Musings.."

July, 2010, Page 62: a former lieutenant recalling his 'coaching' from a a more senior officer:

"Lieutenant....the most important thing you need to remember is to say BS ten times a day." It suddenly dawned on me: ...decisions are the difference between a mission's success or failure....In his artful way he was telling me not to accept things as they initially appeared but rather to look harder, ask questions, and get to the root cause of an issue before rendering a solution

Colonel Kenneth Lynn

This advice may be decades old, but it is timeless

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Managing Millinneals

Did you catch the article on a new training doctrine in the July 2010 issue of "Military Officer"? If not, here's something that caught my eye that--if you are an 'old fart' PM [born before 1980]--you might find instructive:

Members of the millennial generation [born after 1980] "communicate--and recreate--differently, as a result of technology that is omnipresent in our society. .... They question orders like [they] have always done, but sociologists tell us they do that not because they are being confrontational, but because they are interested in improving outcome. They form teams to solve problems in different ways, probably due to the way they use technology to communciate"

LTGEN Mark Hertling

"Interested in improving outcome"? Sounds good to me!

In my last project, populated extensively by millennials, one of my comptemporary colleagues commented of our team: "I have shoes older than these people!"

Time passes!

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Risk v. Issue

I recently had a conversation in which I was asked if a budget "constraint" should be identified on a risk register. I answered this way:

"I make the distinction between an issue and a risk, because the methodology for each is different. Different methods are motivated by different time frames.

Issues: current time, present problem. Methods include problem investigation, problem solving, and conflict resolution, among others [These methods are not not normally in Risk Mgmt; see Six Sigma for excellent problem investigation protocols]

Risks: future time, probable problem, but not certain. Amenable to mitigation. Methods include response planning and mitigation actions to implement plan to mitigate occurrence of problem, not solve the problem itself.

So, depending on the timing of the budget constraint, it is either an issue or a risk. Ordinarily, PMs keep a register for issues separate from the register for risk because of different temporal attributes and different methods in the tool box.

And, the constraint may only be a surrogate for the real risk. The "real risk" may be a misalignment between sponsor and PM of--or about--deliverable value, or expected result. This is a point of the Project balance sheet, and Utility.

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Why we need the explorers

Brian Cox is here. He is a scientist and public speaker in the Carl Sagan mold, and co-author of the new book "Why does E = mc2, (and why should we care)"

In this TED video, he gives examples of why we need the exploration of science. He remarks that studies have shown an ROI on Apollo of 14:1. He quotes--near the end of the presentation in a truly moving way--from Carl Sagan and Humphrey Davey on the need to keep pushing frontiers.

For PM's with projects on the cutting edge, this is a motivating and inspiring presentation by Dr. Cox.

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System Engineering for PM's

If you are managing a technology project and need to understand a bit about what the system engineers will be doing on your project, a read of the eight pages of Chapter 1 of "Systems Engineering Fundamentals" from the Defense Acquistion University is a good place to start.  If you want to go further, dive into Chapter 3.

And, it's a free download for all of , military or not.

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Freedom of expression

From Dr. Albert Einstein:

Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.

Think about this when you develop project governance or impose arbitrary limits on expression

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Future choice decisions

Robin M. Hogarth says this about future choice decisions:

"Future choice decisions are decisions that have three important sources of complexity:

• First, actions taken today can have unknown consequences at future horizons that are difficult to specify.
• Second, decisions imply complex inter-temporal tradeoffs.
• And, third, it is problematic to specify relevant states of the world, let alone assess thier probabilities

As written in "Subways, coconuts, and foggy minefields; an approach to studying future-choice decisions", an essay in the "The Irrational Economist", Public Affairs, New York, 2010

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