A well known and very vocal Project Management instructor made a statement about Government Projects always being late and over budget. Then making a not so subtle suggestion that his competency based assessment approach, versus the PMI approach to certification, is solution to better project management.

Man, do I wish that was the case. Here's my hands on experience in the government (DoD, DOE, DHS) experience on the program controls side.

• Requirements changes impact programs in ways that are not desernable when first suggested. We see this all the time. “Let's make this change from one real-time control data bus to another real-time control bus for all the right reasons” – faster, better, cheaper. But then the second and third order impacts start showing up months later.
• Techncial architecture impacts are many times unknown. “Let's scale up the number of processing units from 20 to 100. It's only a 5 times increase, so let's up the cost and other impacts by 7 to account for unknowns. Turns out the real impact was not 7 but 14, twice what was estimated. Materials impacts, process flow impacts, the overall thermal impacts were huge impacts on the program.

The  processes used to manage a program are absolutely necessary for success. Earned Value Management, prorgammatic and techncial risk management, Systems Engineering, Measures of Effectiveness and Measures of Performance driving the Techncial Perfomance Measures.

But necessary of OK, what about the sufficient conditions?

• Senior management must behave in rational ways.
• Change control is mandatory, not as a “constraint,” but as a process to reveal impacts
• All parts are connected, no matter what the suppliers say. A Systems Engineering paradigm is mandator for all things other then simple projects.

These, and many others, are not directly related to project management processes, even the general purpose ones found in PMBOK^®.

At the bottom of this discussion the “necessary AND sufficient” conditions starts and ends with:

• Past performance,
• Extensive experience,
• Processes and tools, and
• The necessary leadership to put all this together.

Now how can we increase the probability of project success? This is the 64 thousand, 64 Million, and maybe 64 Billion dollar question.

Simple, and many times simpilistic soultions are just that simple and many times simplisitic.

We have to remember …

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. – H. L. Mencken

There are no soltions to complex problems. Complexs are part of our current life paradigm. All the easy problems have been solved. So rarely will there be a problem that can be solved with a simple solution.

The original is here: Herding Cats