The Regenerate Web

Eminence based medicine — The more senior the colleague, the less importance he or she placed on the need for anything as mundane as evidence. Experience, it seems, is worth any amount of evidence. These colleagues have a touching faith in clinical experience, which has been defined as “making the same mistakes with increasing confidence over an impressive number of years.” The eminent physician's white hair and balding pate are called the “halo” effect. — from "Seven alternatives to evidence based medicine," British Medical Journal, 18 December 1999.

When I hear about new and innovative processes, technologies, or theories of how to cure the world's ills - from energy to new management techniques, I start my quest with the question...

Ya got any evidence your idea actually works in the domain I'm currently working in?

No? Well go get some and come back, I'd love to see it work here. Many times I never hear from them again.

I've used several approaches to collecting and managing ideas over the years. There were URL browsing capture tools that put links into folders. There is of course each browsers ways of saving links. There is MindJet which can do this on your computer and then you can publish the Mind Map to the web. The are several mind mapping tools, The Brain is one that I tried for awhile.

But now I've found what I was looking for, with a few missing features. It's call PeralTree. Not that snappy a title. But it does what I need. Captures web content and arranges it into "trees" that can be navigated with a Flash PlugIn. You can share nodes in the tree with others.

It needs some more work.

• Interface with Outlook for emailing links to locations in the Tree
• A way to cross link, so navigation can move between nodes. That would make it a network navigator

But so far it fits the bill for the perfect idea organizer.

If we're ever going to move away from the anecdotal style books, we're going to need experiments that show the recommended changes actually work. The material to the left, Code of Best Practice: Experimentation is one place to start.

In the beginning of Agile it was all anecdotal. Strong push back came when there were questions about applying those practices outside of personal experience. It is a trait of many disciplines that the early developers have a good idea, but resist attempts to have others assess and verify their ideas. Just try it you'll discover what I discovered. That's good when the project is low risk. But when you're using someone else's money, it's a bit harder to just try it.

Same situation in the business process management domain. Listing all the problems is possibly good, but I doubt many are unfamiliar with all the problems. Listing solutions to those problems in the absence of a domain and a context in that domain, mean the anecdotal information is stuck in the domain and context of the author.

In order to move - credibly move - to another domain, an experiement is needed to show the suggested solution methods will actually work.

This is another aspect of popular books, they are usually missing that experiment in another domain.

Here's my working example

Agile development in the form of Scrum has been around for a long time. It is used in many domains.

There is conjecture that it can be applied to government IT programs. There are conferences about this topic. I've spoken at several and introduced the idea that the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the Defense version (DFAR) have much to say about how you manage a program and what methods are used.

The work now is to connect the two ideas - Agile and FAR/DFAR/Earned Value - so both can work in the ways they are supposed to work.

So Back To Business Processes

We've got lots of suggestions on how to un-stick business management. Got any experimental evidence that any of those suggestions actually work? No? Then we're at the same place we were when XP started. You gotta try it before you can say it doesn't work. Not likely when someone else's money is involved.

Power to the Edge: Command and Control in the Information Age, speaks to the integration of traditional management with complex systems in the presence of agility, emergence, and variability of the real world.

This is a book about managing in the defense systems domain and the technology advances that push the decision making processes to the edge of system.

This is about architecture of the system. The human system, the techncial system, the operational system, and the governance system, and the environment in which these systems are embedded.

While the book is focused on military systems, it is applicable to other complex systems. Military systems have many if not most of the attributes of business systems.

They have strategy, emerging requirements, adversaries who want to put you at a disadvantage, limited budgets, limited time to deploy the solution, conflicts internally and externally that conspire to have your efforts fail.

The notion of centralized planning and decentralized execution has merit in modern software development processes and the business they support. Planning is NOT used in the way agile software developers use the word Planning - wrongly BTW. Planning in the defense domain, for defense processes, and the programs that deliver the systems used in those processes means Strategy Making.

All Planning is Strategy Making. So when you here an agilest say Responding the Change Over Following The Plan, they should really be saying following the schedule. The irony of course is even the formal DoD Earned Value Management world, there is a nice little form titled BCR (Budget Change Request) and its used all the time to make changes to the cost and scehdule baseline. Whym beacuse things change. But if we're changing our Strategy all the time, then there's a much bigger problem to solve.

Calculating Outcomes

To follow on a recent theme of what's wrong with populist book? is shown in this example. Integrating Air, Land, and Sea Operations, which speaks to integration of complex systems into a System of Systems that behaves in ways not definable in the beginning. This is done through intelligent agents at the nodes of the network. This is called network centric warfare.

The Integrated Master Plan (IMP) is a Strategy for the successful completion of the Program. Like all strategies, a set of hypothesis are needed to test the strategy. With these hypothesis testing processes, there is no way to known if the strategy - the Plan - will work.

This is a sample of a book where popular ideas are presented and at the same time actionable outcomes are provided.

When there are statements like this, in the absence of a domain and a context of a domain, it just reinforces why I don't recommend you read any populist books on a topic if you have any skills at all of getting to the first level of actual technical context for that topic.

So let's start here with a survey of the topic from the non-populist point of view - that is actionable. That is from the point of view of people who want to calculate something, make a decision on the outcomes from that analysis.

Nothing wrong what so ever with those populist approaches. But one test that has served me well over the decades is can I calculate something with this person's product (book, paper, or article)?

No? Then I may not be able to calculate something directly from the author's work, but I'd better be able to find out how to do it in an appendix or a reference.

Still a No? Then is there something there that will lead me to the next level of understanding where I can start to see how I can calculate something. Here's the recent example about Moving Beyond Populist Books.

What's this means is that while the populist books may be informative to many - and we need a lot more informed people than we have now - these populist books and materials quickly run out of steam when we want to actually make a decision that involves money, time, resources, risk, commitment of someone else's stuff. In other words we need to know quantitatively and analytically what the probability of success will be if we follow that authors advise.These populist books play a role of starting the conversation, but fail to complete the conversation - in many cases - with actionable outcomes. They point out the problem but not the actions need to create the solution. Knowing the problem is necessary but not sufficient.

I can hear the populist authors squawking now.

What! How dare you critize my popularizaiton of this critically important topic with your lame need to actually apply this idea in a quantifiable manner. 

But their role is to popularize a topic, not necessary do the calculations needed to solve problems with the popularization.

So if you look at the reading list of the paper above, you'll see books, papers, articles that DO provide actionable outcomes. Once you've digested the populist ideas, take a tour of those to see if there is anything there you can put to work on your own complexity management problem.

Don't get me wrong. Populist books are fine. But they are just that populist not the engineering books I need to work the problems in front of me.

For some more background on complex systems in the world I work see:

• NDIA Human Systems
• Verification and Validation in Complex Adaptive Systems
• Cybe Space: The Ultimate Adaptive System and the Operationalizing Agility 
• The Agility Advantage: A Survivall Guide for Complex Enterprises and Endeavors. This eBook will freak out the agilest who don't understand the notion of Command and Control is mission critical paradigms, where agility must operate in the presence of 100% Mission Success.

When I read something like..

Self-organization is the process where a structure or pattern appears in a system without a central authority or external element imposing it through planning.

I get a smile on my face. The populist (like that above) definition of a CAS is clearly designed to inform the general public and establish a basis of discussion around the notion that organizations and the people who populate them are subject to forces outside of their control and management must act accordingly.

Good advice. But it's one of those good pieces of advice based on a naïve understanding of the underlying principles. In this case the Lagrangian of the individual elements that interact with each through a combined set of ground rules. In the mechanical systems domain, gravitational, electromagnetic, the strong, and weak forces - your choice.

But First Some Background

A vision shared by most researchers in complex systems is that certain intrinsic, perhaps even universal features capture fundamental aspects of complexity in a manner which transcends specific domains. It is in identifying these features that sharp differences arise. In disciplines such as biology, engineering, sociology, economics, and ecology, individual complex systems are necessarily the objects of study, but there often appears to be little common ground between their models, abstractions, and methods.

From Complexity and Robustness, J. M. Carlson, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 and John Doyley, Control and Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125.

It's for this very reason that statements found in the first quote - in the absence of a domain and context - have little use outside of popularizing the notion of Complex Adaptive Systems. They best serve those seeking words without the underlying tools for analysis.

It is this little common ground where the popularizations have difficulty. They want to state ideas without out all the wrangling about the details, the semantics, the gory mathematical complexities. They are popular and therefore readable in the absence of the details.

Failing to acknowledge that popularizations are just that, popular for a reason, creates issues when it comes to making calculations or decisions using other peoples money.

Back to the Populist Approach

Who cares if the statement above is based on naive principles, if it works? Well clearly those reading and writing general management books are not concerned with the underlying details. Their job is to inform the populace not provide tools to calculate solutions.I'm reminded of the advice to Stephen Hawking when he was writing A Brief History in Time. He was told sales of the book go down by ½ for every equation he used. Compared to The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, (a graduate text I still have on my shelf), where every page  of the 381 pages is as dense like the clip to the left of this paragraph. (Click for full size)

Motivation for the Underlying Principles

Let's look beyond the simple definition for some understanding of CAS. But first let's look for some motivation...

As a physician, I learned to think from a biological perspective. When I went into management, traditional organizational theory seemed artificial, foreign to my experience. So when I started studying complexity, I was stunned. Here was a way of thinking about organizations that compared them to living things. That makes sense to me, intuitively." Richard Weinberg, MD, Vice President, Network Development, Atlantic Health System, Passaic, New Jersey

This intuitive understanding is critical for many reasons, not the least of which is to convey a broader understanding of the problem space to the general public to gain their interest in further discussion.

So here's a succinct definition from the Santa Fe Institute focused on the social aspects of CAS.

Definition: A Complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a system of individual agents, who have the freedom to act in ways that are not always totally predictable, and whose actions are interconnected such that one agent's actions changes the context for other agents. Examples of complex adaptive systems include: the stock market, a colony of termites, the human body immune system; and just about any collection of humans such as an industry, a business organization, a department within an organization, a team, a church group, a family, or the Rotary Club.

In this definition of CAS these agents act according to their own rules. These rules are defined for specific classes of agents in the system. Either one rule for all or a single rule for each of agents, or any combination.

The behavior of the resulting system emerges from the interaction among the agents executing their rules of interaction. In this case the Central Authority is the collection (one or many) Ground Rules for how these interactions take place. This is subtle but critical to the next step, when CAS is applied to business.

There are always Ground Rules. To not have ground rules defies the laws of physics. But these ground rules may be flawed. When they are, the outside observer would say the system is broken. That is the system behaves in undesirable ways. But those ground rules that central authority is still in place. It is always in place.

In order to return the system to its desired behavior, those ground rules of interaction must change.

The CAS exhibits novel behaviors resulting from the interactions. The interactions defined by the ground rules covering all objects in the system, or "N" Ground Rules one for each element, result in fundamentally unpredictable behavior. It is not a question of better understandings of the agents, better models, or faster computing; as we have come to believe erroneously, based on the machine metaphor. We simply cannot reliably predict the detailed behavior of a CAS through analysis.

But this does not mean there is no control system in place. This control system is distributed among the elements of the system. When the phrase...

where a structure or pattern appears in a system without a central authority

...is used it begs the question - what is the definition of Central? Most populist approaches fail to make this subtle and important distinction. This is why they are populist. To make these distinctions requires deep analysis and the introduction of more complex mathematics. The analogy used in the original quote suffices for the discussion at the populist level. It works, so let's move on.

But of course, we'll want to calculate something one of these days. Say the forecast close of the Stock Market tomorrow, given any non-disruptive events. While we cannot predict the precise closing value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average tomorrow, we can estimate (with a confidence interval) the market trend as bullish or bearish and take appropriate action on this estimate with a known confidence.

Note the qualifier of any non-disruptive event. This approach provides some confidence in understanding human based systems. But care is needed to not over-estimate the ability to predict what will happen outside the error bounds of our forecast.

It is popular to say ...

In a CAS, control is dispersed throughout the interactions among agents; a central controller is not needed.

Notice the difference between control and controller. The controller is distributed among the agents. But there is control, just not in a single entity.

In the end the business writers are right, but for the wrong reason.

Trying to apply external control, or a single internal controller leads to disappointment. But there is control and that control must be in place for any system to work and not turn into a dispersed set of agents flying off into the universe. This is the definition of Chaos.

The Take Away

The ground rules of the independent controllers that make up the control algorithm of the system must act in ways that produce beneficial outcomes. It is the correction of the actions of the individual (or collective) controllers that make up the control algorithm that must be the target of management processes.

Not the naive belief that there is no control needed and the control will emerge from the group of agents. There is always control at some level, be it microscopic or macroscopic. But it is always there. If it is microscopic we may not be able to see it or have any influence on its outcomes. If it is at too high a macroscopic level we are likely not going the like the outcome either.

In the end it is the semantics that are important, especially when we want to calculate something - say the probability that it will rain tomorrow on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. Since the weather on the Front Range is a CAS - all weather is a CAS - doesn't not remove our ability to make forecasts of it's behavior in the very short term and the long term - Global Circulation Model scales. And especially when we want to make MANAGEMENT decisions in the presence of CAS, these populist descriptions fail to provide much guidance.

With all the wrangling around simple systems, avoiding complexity, emergent order out of complexity, we need to ask what does complexity achieve.

In a paper titled, Complexity and Robustness J. M. Carlson, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 and John Doyley, Control and Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125 , they tell us ...

While watching the AFC West playoffs with our beloved Broncos v. New England (they lost bad, were outplayed, and couldn't stop Brady), it dawned on me how defining the domain is critically important to any discussion around a method. This is connected to the popular statement in a well known agile management book...

A football team self-organizes within the boundaries of the playing field and the rules as they are laid down by the football association.

The first thing to recognize in American Football, when watching the game in the family room, is the coaches call the plays. A world class quarter back may decide on the line to change the play with an audible, but the offensive coordinators see the field from the top of the stadium and call plays from the  play book - the strategy for winning the game. The game is NOT self organizing on the field. Maybe the company picnic flag football game.

The coach calls plays from the side line, with the advice from the coordinators - offense and defense.

The is how professional football works. Similar processes take place for Volleyball, pre-planned plays. Baseball not so much, since the play evolves from the pitch, but once the ball, if hit, the processes for getting the out are practiced and practiced and all the palyers know exactly what to do. Same for Volleyball - having played in college.

Don't tell me you're game is on, you do it in practice first - Brady to Gronkowski

The 3rd TD Brady to Gronkowski, where he was ½ step ahead of the defender and the pass landed in his hands without missing a step. This is not self-organizing on the field. That pass had to have been practiced 500 times. Every step, every shoulder turn, every motion practiced. That's called execution excellence.

Hockey executes rehearsed plays, soccer executes rehearsed plays. Once in awhile there is a broken play, but not often. I don't know of any field sport where the game evolves on the field guided by rules defined by some external body. Even professional cycling has a strategy for every portion of the course. Watch the Tour and the coaches in their cars talking to the riders,reading from the play book for the race, guided by the course and the specific responsese to the action developing in front of them.

I know of no successful complex activity that can succeed through self directed action by the player(s) on the field in the absence of a Plan and a set of practiced Plays needed to execute the Plan. There also must be plans for handling the unexpected once the game is underway.

The next popularized statement is ...

Self-organization is the process where a structure or pattern appears in a system without a central authority or external element imposing it through planning.

This of course violates the laws of physics of any system of interactions in the known universe. Human systems of course appear to operate in this way, but only because human systems are complex in ways not understood by other humans. So if the domain of human systems in the presence of poorly understood interactions had been used, then maybe the statement would have merit.

Here's What Has To Be In A Plan For Success

So let's look first at the processes needed in the presence of human systems to establish a central authority and an external planning process. Both are present in all human systems. The central authority, in our program management domain is usually called The Ground Rules. Having ground rules prevents chaos from breaking out on day one. Re-imposition of the Ground Rules can recover the human system from chaos.

I'm working a program now where chaos reigns, because the Ground Rules for managing the project have been abandoned. And this Blog is about managing projects, so we'll stick with the management of projects domain, even complex projects involving complex human behaviour.

So here some Ground Rules for project success in the presence of possibly chaotic human behaviour, whether we're playing a team sport or building the next manned space flight machine.

1. The team has to know what done looks like, so they can recognize done when it arrives.
2. They have to know how to reach done, usually along multiple paths, since the plan never goes according to plan.
3. The have to have the right resources, skills, experience, capabilities, intent, and capacity to execute the plan.
4. The impediments to success must be recognized, handled, and reduced (retired) within the planned budget and schedule. It's easy to handle risk when you've got more money and time than you planned.
5. And finally to succeed you've got to measure your progress in units that are meaningful to the decision makers. In the Pro-Football paradigm, it's not just the scoreboard (well it is in the end) along the way. There are dozens of metrics used to measure progress toward that win. This is the case in any sport and it is certainly the case for projects using other peoples money.

So the football paradigm popularized in the quote above is not actually how American Football, Soccer, or any other ground rules based team sport works unless it is just jungle ball as we would say about the company picnic volleyball game - which I learned long ago never to participate in.

There is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects - Jorge Luis Borges ”La flor de Coleridge”, in Otras Inquisiciones 1952.

When we seek to produce a credible plan, schedule, cost, or technical performance estimate, we must know the causes of variance and the impact of that variance on the acceptability to sustain successful  outcomes from our work efforts.

The Five process areas of a successful project or program are.

There is a hierarchy for applying of these principles:

1. Needs, Goals, and Objectives - business direction based on higher level objectives.
2. Business Unit requirements - structure, relationships, governing principles, and inter-business unit mission linked to the accomplishment of the needs, goals, and objectives.
3. Business Unit Requirements - high level requirements flowed to the program to carry out the strategic and architectural direction including programmatic and technical aspects for initiation of specific projects in the business unit.
4. Program Requirements - detailed requirements for a Program to implement the Program Plan and flow downs to requirements allocated to specific project elements.
5. Project Requirements - detailed requirements for a Project implementation allocated to the technical and operational elements.
6. System Requirements - detailed requirements allocated from a Project to the next lower level of the system elements.

This approach builds a line of sight traceability from the lower level technical elements to the Mission of the Program to produce needed capabilities.

Some would suggest that emergent requirements are the way to go, with self directed team. But when spending someone else's money, the answer to why are you doing this needs an answer connected to the desired capabilities resulting from the work effort.

Tuesday night Dr. James T. Brown is speaking on the Principles of Program Management.

I've reviewed the book and attended a previous talk at the Colorado Springs PMI Chapter.

This time, I'm bringing my book for a signature.

If you are looking for the seminal book on how to manage a collection of projects, this is it.

Jurgen Appelo has posted about the #STOOS Network and its focus on management improvement. I followed a link to Steve Denning's materials. All good stuff at the principles level. What came to mind through these voices is the difference between a project focused organization and a process or production focused organization. It seems Denning speaks to the issues of found in process or production organizations, where the mission is to keep the system running.

I work exclusively in project focused organization. I've come to this position through a career of building products with other peoples money. Either government money, external customer money, or internal funding from the firm I work for.

When I read the materials from people like Steve Denning, I've started to understand that many of the things we take for granted in the project focused organization are missing from the process oriented organizations.

I have several experiences with Enterprise IT in process focused orgs, where no clear mission, defined set of needed capabilities, and tangible measures of "DONE" are present. I learned recently (in the past 5 years) that I don't fit well in environments where these are missing. I came to this through some painful experiences, where I learned that in the absence of mission and vision, definitive capabilities connected to those mission outcomes, hard high level requirements, a fixed schedule and budget, and technical complexity, people tend to focus on the interpersonal aspects of the project. The self actualization for their own needs and desires. The softer side of project management. All important stuff, but only secondary connected with the production of products.

The seminal example of the opposite of production can be found in manned space flight, weapons systems development, and my crucible experience - Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site (RFETS). RFETS was a wonderful marketing term for retiring a nuclear weapons plant.

The book shown above is the case study for that program. Here are some contents of the book that I now live by and may add value to those of you working in the process focused business domain where people focus on their self actualization and not on the outcomes of those efforts.

The book's principle is Heliotropic Abundance (HA). After reading the book (long after I worked there) I had an understanding of how my bosses performed inside the context of HA and how I learned how to manage projects.

HA is the counter to conventional management principles. The tables below describe the differences between these two approaches, along with quotes from the book by the participants that I use in my our approach to managing projects, programs, and portfolio.

• One key role of top management is to ensure that effective leadership is present throughout an organization.
• We can have a great plan, we can have the money to implement the plan, but if we don't have the human commitment and the will to execute the plan, it all falls apart.
• There are three (3) leadership roles needed for change to occur: (1) Idea champion, sponsor, and orchestrator (in Developing Management Skills, Chameron, 2005)
• Idea champions are often the most visible leaders. They are the ones who receive most of the credit for success.
• Sponsorship acquires resources, but are seldom recognized for their contributions.
• Orchestrators bring individual together for implementation of the vision or idea.

The successful leadership of extraordinary change require the pursuit of simultaneously conflicting strategies

• Effective articulation of a motivating and inspiring vision is always dependent on visual images and symbols.
• One of the most significant symbolic events was the announcement that a substantial portion of the profits ... would be shared with the work force.
• If you don't like problem solving you won't like working here.
• ... an attitude of try it, find a way, and learn from mistakes.
• Being told no opened a door so that we could do something else that woudl be successful.

• The idea of following through on commitments - at almost any cost - was driven by top management from the very outset of the project.

• Challenges and opportunities must be created that make the current culture appear inadequate and incapable.

• Proactively, not reactivity ... in sharing performance news build trust.
• Small wins and small problems should be surfaced quickly and early.

In the end having a clear and concise goal, derived from a mission and vision establishes the basis of success. We all knew what done looked like on a daily basis. Early in the project the Plan of the Month was used to develop our work efforts. Then the Plan of the Week and finally the Plan of the Day.

I've used the Plan of the Week many times, sometimes with success sometimes without. The idea of the PoW is to state upfront what will be accomplished at the end of the week by the team. These accomplishments MUST be in tangible units of measure meaningful to the team. Never I'm going to make 4 sales calls or I'm going to work on the marketing brochure for our new offering, or I'm going to work on getting the new baseline back to GREEN in the EV Engine. This is called Level of Effort, Train Watching and measuring it is a waste of time.

The outcomes at the end of the week must be tangible, move the project forward in its maturity, reduce risk, stay on budget and generally contribute to the increasing probability of success.

The goal paradigm at RFETS was...

If your work doesn't do that, you need to look somewhere else for employement

Thanks to my supervisors (CFO, VP Programs) for teaching me that in an environment of Heliotropic Abundance.

I hope the efforts of Jurgenm come to the same conclusion.

I was searching through the file server looking for a paper written long ago and came across a drawing I had made for a "lunch and learn" after the deVinci Code came out.

The Golden Ratio Phi is 1.6180223....

Here's how to produce that value with simple geometry. This was done in Visio and uses a ruler to measure te distances.

The steps are easy:

1. Draw a right triangle with a base of 100 and the height of 50.
2. From the upper right apex of the triangle, use the protractor to inscribe an arc of radius 50.
3. Inscribe an arch from the lower left apex of radius where the first insscribed arc intersected the 50 radius on the connecting the upper right and lower left apexes.
4. The intersection of that arc and the line of length 100 divides that line into 61.8036 and 38.197 length.
5. That ratio is the Golden Ratio = 1.6180223577 ...

Roger Kent posted a comment in the current edition of PMI's PM Network. It's one of those posts that causes a twitch to appear in me if for the only reason there is a PMI logo on the material.

Let's start with the second edition of the Earned Value Management Practice Guide for look at Roger's comments:

• EV actually comes from the shop floor, where the question was are we earning our budget for this work.
• EV doesn't care about the size of the project, it simply asks the question if we had planned to spend an amount of money to produce an outcome, did we spend this money at the planned time for the planned outcomes. And if so did this outcome fulfill the planned requirements? That is was the outcome 100% complete on the planned day for the planned amount?
• You'd think that for a Project Manager knowing the percent complete of your efforts would be an important measure of the project's success. If you're making these numbers up, you've got bigger problems than understanding the application of EV.
• If Roger has a project that is 95% complete for a long time, he needs EV. He'd see that the project is now making no progress and it's just spending money. The CV is going in the ditch along with the SV.
• EV works for any project that has a budget, has a means of capturing actual costs, and a means of measuring physical percent complete against the planned percent complete. You know a credible project plan with a credible project management method. Don't have this information, no problem, you'll discover soon enough you're late, over budget, and you're gadget probably doesn't work.

So the real question is how can a PMI publication, with a contribution from a PMP, who provides PM consultanting not have a basic misunderstanding of how EV contributes to increasing the probability of project success?

I'm not suggesting at all that every project should make use of EV. But that decision needs to be made in the presence of the 5 Immutable Principles of project management. Then those making the decision can determine how to answer those questions in the absence of EV for the neede to measure progress to plan, cost, and techncial performance.

And the future is certain Give us time to work it out

The notion that the future can be forecast in the absence of probabilistic models is of course nonsense. Nonsense in the same way water fall is used as a Red Herring by agilest for bad project management.

All elements of all projects are probabilistic. Without acknowledgement at a minimum, and full inclusion as a credible approach, all project management approaches will be a disappointment.

I'm not a big fan of the Let's Change the World school of management. But Jurgen Appelo's efforts at the #STOOS Gathering are of interest to me for several reasons:

• Management processes are my profession
• Change processes are hard, and I'm interested to see if there is success here that I can use
• Jurgen has a unique take on the world and I'm interested to see if he has something I can use

The ideas and suggestions are here

I've gathered a few ideas from this that are worth commenting on:

• Page 2: Never doubt a small group ... can change the world - Margret Mead. Good stuff, but those small groups always had an actionable outcome. This is one of the failings of the OWS, no actionable outcomes.
• Bob Marshall (Page 3) hits it again - no actionable outcomes
• Paul Boos (a kindred military aviator) - Page 9 - has good advice. The current military small unit structure is a good example of management principles in action that coudl be used in business
• Erika Anderson - viral processes work. Yes they do, but they work because they are effective for the problem at hand. So what is the problem at hand and who has this problem?
• Page 19 has an important message. We are motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. But to suggest most CEO don't get this has no merit, since most is not defined. The CEO's I know and the very few I've worked with ALL have this drive. One problem is too much generalization is the norm when it comes to these sorts of things - changing the world things.
• Page 20 is Steve Jobs and Apple. There's an example.

Lot's more, but you can read them yourself.

Here's my contribution (that not surprisingly didn't make it)

• Define the problem in units of measure of success outcomes. Meaning I want to achieve this outcome. I need possess this capability and need to make these changes to do so. This is called Capabilities Based Planning.
• Look for working examples of success in firms around the world that have accomplished what you are looking to do. There are plenty of them. A literature search is the first step in any development process. Why do all the work if someone else has do it for you.
• Put those successes in some type of taxonomy that makes sense for your domain.
• Look for principles and practices in that taxonomy that can be put work in your domain.
• Look for research of others that has shown the problem and the solutions, and the reasons for less than expected results.

Making the Impossible Possible is a starting point. Heliotropic Abundance is the basis of the processes used at Ricky Flats (the book and place I worked as a Program Manager).

Positive Organizational Scholarship is an approach that might inform the conversation. Look to places where it is working (what ever it is) and determine if how they got it working can be moved to your domain.

Jurgen Appelo has a nice post about the efforts to speed up the change in the management processes. While I don't share their goal for several reasons, it's still a good goal in principle.

My experience is that management processes in mature domains are well suited to service the needs of the domain. In inmature domain, management processes are good targets for improvement.

In building launch vehicles, manned space craft, weapons systems, commercial aircraft, the management processes are tailored to the need. They are disciplined, rigorous, methodical, and may appear to outsiders to be slow and plodding. These domains have heavy software requirements and many of the agile principles are in place, along with the management processes to get maximum benefit for them in the context of formal contracting.

In this domain, we get in trouble when we DON'T flow the processes and try to skip steps, replace known working methods with new and untried ones.

But there are many domains where management needs to be overhauled, and Jurgen and company are on a quest to do just that.

The Analogy Trap

Jurgen mentions the "attractor" as the analogy of the management processes that need to be changed.

That management is Attracted to a set of processes and those processes need to be changed. The picture above is labeled an attractor but it is in fact a picture of the path followed by the underlying equations of motion of a dynamic system. It is the artifact of this dynamic system.

Why is this an issue? Well it's simple. Jurgen mentions changing the attractor - replacing it with a new attractor.

It is NOT the attractor that needs to be changed, but the underlying equations that create the attractor that must be changed to produce a new attractor. These equations represent the dynamics of the system. When the analogy is flawed, we loose the ability to actually drive the change. We give away the connection between cause and effect. And then we're disappointed when something doesn't happen.

The garden as a self organizing system is one such analogy that produces less than expected results of good tomatoes, when we let them do their own thing.

In systems (complex or not) the equations of motion that produce a set of paths when captured over time produce pictures like the one above. These equations are deterministic, they are complex, they can emergent, and they are almost always represented in some space other than our familiar 3 dimensional world of X,Y,Z coordinates. The sample picture is in phase space not Euclidean space.

A simple example is the spherical coordinates of our world - the surface of the earth. If we were to start walking in a direction and hold our heading - or flying would be better - we'd end up in the same place we started. A spherical coordinate system returns us to the same place in the coordinate system after a 360° transformation - a 2? rotation.

The picture above is in a Phase Space, rather than a geometric coordinate system. The generation of the path in phase space is a common method in physics for showing complex relationships between the processes - a nice approach for management processes.

But the attractor does not attract in the sense of a force, pulling on an object - in the classical physics sense.The statement in the Wikipedia link is technically not correct. ... points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed. Those points follow their equations of motion they don't know that they are creating a pretty picture of the attractor, they are just following their deterministic path, guided by their equations of motion.

This is the key concept that should invert the analogy of Jurgen for the betterment of his quest. There is not attractor there are equations of management that must be altered.

The attractor is the path followed by the particle (in Jurgen's case, managers and management processes) while traveling inside the system (the management system). The picture is a plot of the path of the object moving, guided by the equations of motion. In the field I grew up in, the Path Integral describes how particle move between two locations guided by the forces that act on them.

So Back To The Analogy

For an analogy to work - or at least work well enough to be useful - it needs to inform a new understanding from previous understandings. But it has to be correct in the original space. The suggestion that a new attractor should be sought needs to be replaced with the search for a new set of equations of motion to generate the attractor - the picture above.

I got a book for Christmas, Feynman, Ottavini & Myrick. It's a graphic book of the life and accomplishments of Richard Feyman. Feyman was the father of a particle physics theory that won him the Nobel prize. He has great advice (starting on page 157) about when speaking about sticking to the real science when trying to explain something in populist terms. Once you bend the real science in an attempt to explain it in populist terms, the explanation looses its integrity and the resulting understanding looses its integrity as well.

My favorite no integrity populist book is the Tao of Physics, which was a wildly popular in the 70's trying to explain the parallels of particle physics and Eastern Mysticism and was based on completely crap (I was a particle physics grad student at the time).

Why the quest for integrity in the analogy? Once the underlying integrity is lost, the resulting benefit of he analogy is lost as well. That's the point.

Jurgen's analogy between management processes and attractors is useful - and has integrity - for management transformation. But it needs to be inverted to be useful. The underlying equations of motion are (or may be) flawed in the domain Jurgen seeks to improve. The attractor is just the  picture of the path taken by those equations over time. Change the equations - get a picture of the new attractor. Changing the attractor requires changing the equations. Not the other way around.

Seek new equations and the picture will change.

If the picture becomes more attractive in the populist sense, then mission accomplished.

Google used to have a really nice feature in the Reader. You could use a Chrome plugin to post a link to the Reader, make some comments, and then connect that submission to the Reader in this Blog. This was great way to share information and - this is most important - keep a record of these finds for future reference. It was like a post-it note board or like the pages I have in my notebook where I keep ideas for future work.

But Google removed the feature, has some less-than-obvious way to do (not do actually) the same (close to the same) in Google+. Which I don't use and can't actually figure out why I would.

I poked around with TypePad. They haven't figured this out yet. Then I saw some Blogs and web sites , with a streaming twitter window. Ta Da, got it.

I moved all (or most) of the Google reader entries to this Blog through a gadget in Twitter. Now we're back to finding cool things, tweeting them, and capturing them in the Blog for future reference. There  is lots of flak for Google doing this. Maybe another example of Google misreading the users. I see no reason to have removed the feature. It was useful, handy, and cleaver. It's gone and have a dissappointed user.

Enjoy and workaround.

For some unknown reason I feel compelled to write an end of year round up. The top 10 lists, the favorites for the year, that email Christmas letter, are all some cliche. But over the course of the year, I've come to understand more about the management of programs and the program controls activities. This understanding is from reading, listening, and practicing what I read and herd.

So here's some background on that increased understanding.

My Favorite Blogs (of the 300 or so I have Goggle Reader pointed to)

• Eight to Late - a fellow physics person who works in the project side of things. Some of the best though out technical analysis of project behavior there is.
• Musing on Project Management (John Goodpasture) - John and I share many things, including a relationship through Management Concepts where his books are in the lobby.
• Shift Happens (Michael Clayton) - Mike book is a wonderful starting point for managing risk.
• Crossberry Blog (Paul Ritchie) - I've been following Paul since he was at SAP. Great PMO and general PM advice.
• The Earned Value Management Blog (Darryl Schwago) - a REAL earned value blog. Wish mine was a good.
• Learning Leader (Patrick Mayfield) - Pat is a former artillery officer in the Canadian Forces, and we share similar views of the world about PM.
• PMStudent (Josh Nankivel) - Josh's WBS book is the starting point for any credible WBS. Buy it, use it, read how to build it right.
• Agile Management (Jurgen Appelo) - Jurgen is nothing if not thought provoking. Good stuff, and lots of off the wall stuff, but out there making the point that management needs to change.
• I Love Charts - lots of good PM charts useable in training and briefings. Always needed to get away from the boring crap we usually produce.
• Gapping Void (Hugh MacLoed) - the best thought provoking drawings in the world. I've used several (with written permission and attribution) in heavy duty briefings for flag officers. He now has business cards

My years favorite Books

• Measuring Time, Mario Vanhoucke - improving project performance using earned value.
• The Monty Hall Problem - how we totally misunderstand the notion of Bayesian statistics.
• Gödel's Theorem - a guide to the misuse of Gödel's theorem. Mandatory reading for any thinking they know anything about Gödel's Theorem.

With the end of 2011 several events have taken place:

• The Second Version of the PMI Earned Value Management Practice Guide includes Earned Schedule. Even a year ago this would unheard of.
• Programmatic Risk and Opportunity Management are now on the table at the National Defense Industry Association (NDIA) as a candidate for an Intent Guide.
• The discussion of Agile on Federal Contracts started with a Webinar at Management Concepts.
• The notion of Immutable Principles of Project Management has taken hold in several domains, contexts, and firms.

So for just a final reminder, the principles, books, blogs, web sites are applicable to any project, in any domain, and any context in that doman.

Answering these questions depends on the method and process of the project. For a full-up EVMS Ansi 748B project the answers will be different than for a Scrum based agile software development project, and different again for a community food share project at our Parish.

But the answers need to be credible, measurable, and thorough.