The annual NASA PM Challenge is a really good meeting. The speakers are generally excellent and the material covers a wide range from project management fundamentals to the latest great and innovative management ideas. The ratio of outstanding talks to duds is excellent at this conference. Following up on my last post about Norm Smith’s talk at this meeting, here are some additional random ideas, lessons, and thoughts I noted from various talks at the conference:
- Be wary of SPI: it does not care if the work performed was on critical path or non-critical path items. Your project may be more or less on track than SPI indicates.
- For typical projects, CPI does not change significantly after 20-30% of project completion. If the CPI is not good at that point, significant intervention is likely needed to correct it.
- Good PM risk reduction technique: ask “If I gave you some $, what risks could you reduce for how much?”
- Listen to learn.
- Think “I get to” vs. “I have to”.
- Contracts need to acknowledge and provide for iterative and collaborative risk management.
- Contracts should support and provide for strategic as well as tactical collaboration.
- How many technical innovations from the past 20 years do you use daily? How many management innovations from the past 20 years do you use daily?
- Sometimes you have to cast away past successes to reach new ones.
- No one comes to work wanting to do a bad job.
- Adapt to your team, not v/v.
- Starting a new online platform? Seed it with content before going live. People won’t come back if there’s no point the first (few) visit(s).
- Take your job seriously; don’t take yourself seriously.
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