your project is $42,000 behind schedule: an EVM schedule problem

Your client wonders what does this mean? Should the client withhold payments? Can the project manager borrow money to get back on "schedule?"

Bill Locke, successful PM at BAE Corp., presented "A neat solution to the EVM schedule problem."

In Earned Value Management (EVM), Schedule Variance (SV) is the difference between the value earned for tasks completed (EV) and the value of the tasks planned for that period.

Bill gave us handy formulas to convert SV to time (x-axis) rather than dollars (y-axis). This metric provides a clear status to clients and allows the team to better understand the variances and make corrections to the project management.

the #1 voted way to save the US taxpayers money is...

With all of the think tanks, professors, and talk show hosts who claim to have all of the answers, it appears that none showed up when President Obama asked government workers to submit suggestions that will provide US Taxpayers quantifiable savings.

President Obama announced the winning submission, of 38,000 received, that will be implemented into the 2011 annual budget process. The award was given to Ms. Fichtner who states that US Taxpayers can save money at VA hospitals by sending unused medications home with patients or otherwise redistributing the drugs instead of disposing them.

The President's SAVE (Securing Americans Value and Efficiency) Award enables Federal employees to submit their ideas for efficiencies and savings as part of the annual Budget process. The best idea will be included in the 2011 Budget, and the Federal employee who submitted that idea will be invited to a meeting with the President.

think that you can do better?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/save/SaveAwardEmailPage/

Your Boss Loves Dashboards! ACART automates project compliance management

The Business Transformation Agency provides a web tool to tailor and manage architecture compliance relevant to your project. A 60 minute tutorial can be found at:https://acart.bta.mil/ Additional support: http://www.acartcompliance.com/

Dr. Elliot Chikofsky presented this resource to Falls Church Project Management Professionals (PMP). The web tool is a project that can assist a project manager in identifying and tracking the compliance to the myriad of regulations and compliance. Additionally, Dr. Chikofsky's delivery was terrific with an analogy of project architecture documentation (like DoDAF) to a building's blueprints. Although it may never be referenced once the project is complete, it is reassuring to everyone that the project was built to standards.

Dr. Chikofsky's bio.

Once we have created an ACART account and setup our project, it is easy to build graphical and detailed exception reports and a Requirements Traceability Matrix that aid in managing the scope of standards and compliance to apply to a given project.

ACART is a net-centric, compliance and management decision support tool that EM&I developed which helps key stakeholders to scope, assess and assert architecture enterprise requirements compliance as well as architectures, laws, regulations, policies, guidelines and checklists. Although ACART is used to streamline compliance, it is a highly-customizable platform that is also used for comparing systems and requirements and enabling more effective IT investment decisions. Bottomline: ACART assists agencies in determining the "best IT bang for the buck."

is your entire team an "emergency response team?"

Blackberries fire up at 5am, your European customer can't restore the servers after a power outage. The event has three of your teammates sending emails flying to do various systems checks and theorizing the problem.

By 9am, everyone is in the office and buzzing on coffee, when word comes down that the president wants a meeting at 9:30 to understand what happened over the weekend. The team scrambles to assemble and meet in the conference room.

At 11, the team joins the daily telecon with a vendor on the west coast to receive status. Afterwards, the independent test lab requests a meeting to discuss findings in the product testing and at 3pm, a data base sales engineer will meet to share the data standardization adaptors that will become your future architecture.

This twelve hour day is just like every other. The team members are heroes and feel satisfied with all of the issues they resolved and the now dried sweat on their brow.

If you can't relate to this scenario, then you probably don't have dominant team members who want to be where all of the action is, or docile folks that herd with the group, or loosely defined responsibilities.

Matter of fact, you are the pinnacle of where we want to be. You have dedicated colleagues that are allocated to duties. Each person's work is respected and the redundancy of team collaboration on every issue is unnecessary.

Effectively, you have one person doing one person's job, instead of five (or more) people doing one person's job; so the team will get five times more work done. When the workplace "fires" are handled with processes, people are developing efficient personal processes for completing their tasks.

When the responsibilities are not defined, the entire team rushes to the scene of every fire (some out of curiousity, some with the intent to be the hero), each with there own opinion. Chances are good that the smoldering issue could have been managed correctly by a single person tasked with being responsible for these issues and capable enough to seek the necessary inputs and brief the problem/solution.

When teams don't operate within assigned responsibilities, there is chaos from the many opinions and communications channels and will result in many people doing a single-person job. If that one person is not capable enough to manage the issue or responsible enough to follow through with effective communications, that person should be reassigned. Don't allow that person to be "assisted" with dozens of specators.

Decision Support Models

Everyone can appreciate a little support in their decision making, can a model help you?

When do I need a model? How much will it cost? What will be the benefit?

Jane Materna of OrgCapacity.com presented a case study where she supported the DoD Joint Staff with a model to select resource allocations annually. The model was created using http://www.decisionlens.com/ which uses the Analytic Hierarchy Process (Dr. Thomas Saaty).

In this example, a six-week investment to discover the stakeholders, the decision criteria, and the weights provided a defensible process that will have the buyin of multiple stakeholders. The computer program allows for voting and analysis to rack and stack 92 initiatives and the ability to easily tweak the scenarios.

Like all problem solving, the computer can automate the routine, but the underlying process can be easily practiced with some household decisions to learn the mechanics of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). AHP is a fundamental Systems Engineering tool and useful in Six Sigma facilitation.

I recommend using the process outlined http://thequalityportal.com/q_ahp.htm to create a model that will help you decide on which make and model for your next car purchase.