Project Management means different things to different people. From the social and humanistic aspects of managing the people working on and around projects, to the gritty details of a Performance Measurement Baseline, with in integrated cost, schedule, risk, and technical performance measures.

One advantage of working the in Space and Defense business is the social and personality aspects are minimized. Not gone all together, but certainly much less than commercial domains, where egos get in the way many times of getting things done. In A&D “done” is clear and concise – the machine flys away, the product does it's job as defined in the SOW, with measurable outcomes, soldiers are using the product, things like that. Black and White, either it flys or it doesn't fly. Of course it's not that simple, it never is.

But one thing that is different in A&D is the focus on the processes and tools. I'm working a moderate ($300M) Army program through January when we get to the Integrated Baseline Review (IBR). While poking around looking for some ideas for training our customer, I came across PM Lotus's “Setting Baselines in Microsoft Project.”

The Baseline is just what it says it is, the “baseline” of the cost, schedule, and technical performance. Now MSFT Project is not the best at managing baselines. In fact it's pretty poor at managing baselines. No change control, no traceability, not much in the way of mandated documentation. But it's popular and most of our programs use MSFT Project.

Drill down into this site, there are some very good articles for those interested in the programmatic aspects of project management. Like Checklists.

Original post: Herding Cats