A Compendium of Resources to Increase the Probability of Project Success

Over the decades of managing projects and programs in a wide variety of domains (listed above), from software intensive systems, to hardware development, process engineering, to enterprise Information Technology, to environmental cleanup I've collected and applied a core set of principles, processes, and practices, written journal articles, books, and contributed to regulatory guidance.

Here is a collection of Compendiums on the topics from that work, that continues to be expanded

• Managing Complex Systems – there is a conjecture that complex systems cannot be managed. This is not correct, as many of the claims made by self-proclaimed complexity experts are based on experience.
• Managing any program or project starts with knowing what DONE looks like in units of measure, meaning to the decision-makers. This knowledge is anchored on a Capabilities-Based Plan , which tell the decision-makers and all the participants what Capabilities the project has to deliver to accomplish the mission or fulfill a strategy.
• Managing Complex Adaptive System of Systems starts with the Integrated Master Plan and Integrated Master Schedule
• To successfully manage any project, knowledge of estimating the cost, schedule, and technical performance is needed to increase the probability of success.
• All projects operate in the presence of risk created by uncertainties, which on projects come in two forms – Reducible (from Epistemic uncertainty) and Irreducible (from Aleatory uncertainty). The resulting risk must be handled with Risk Management processes.
• Without finding the Root Cause of risk, the conditions, and actions that created that cause, and defining the corrective and preventive actions to remove, protect, or isolate the system from those causes - No suggested fix can be credible.
• All of these processes are based on the Mathematics of Project Management , which includes standard materials and more complex approaches to modeling risk, and outcomes to produce informed decisions needed to increase the probability of project success.
• For all these processes to be successful Proper Estimates are needed for cost, schedule, technical performance, risk, root cause analysis and the effectiveness or each principle, process, and procedure. By the Way, whenever you hear some nonsense notion from a #NoEstimates advocate it is just that Nonsense. Only a de minimus project can survive not estimating, since no one will care if you are late, over budget, and the outcomes don't work to fulfill the mission or strategy.