Navigating the Way Home
Glen Alleman MSSM
Vetern, Applying Systems Engineering Principles, Processes & Practices to Increase the Probability of Program Success for Complex Systems in Aerospace & Defense, Enterprise IT, and Process and Safety Industries
I came across a nice blog post about the navigation powers of birds.?
This bird was taken from Wale's to Venice, Italy, and released. It found its way home in 14 days, 930 miles over mountains.
Birds must carry a figurative map and compass in their brains to find their way home from an unfamiliar place.
The map tells them where they are, and the compass tells them which direction to fly, even when they are released with no frame of reference to their home loft.
Projects Are Not Birds
As project managers, what's our map and compass? How can we navigate from the start of the project to the end, even though we haven't been on this path before??
How can we find our way Home?
We have a map. It starts with a Capabilities Based Plan (CBP). The capabilities are needed to accomplish the Mission or fulfill the strategy. The CBP states what?Done looks like in units of measure meaningful to the decision makers. These units of measure are?Measures of Effectiveness and?Measures of Performance.
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These measures speak to our?home and its attributes. The?map?that gets us home is the?Integrated Master Plan. This shows the increasing maturity of the deliverables that implement the Measures of Performance and those Performance items that enable the project to produce the needed capabilities to effectively accomplish the mission or fulfill the business need.?
This looks like a?map?for the increasing value delivery for an insurance company. The map shows the path or actual paths to?home. Home is the ability to generate value from exchanging money to develop software.
Here is some more guidance on applying Capabilities-Based Planning.
With the Capabilities Defined, the next step is to build the Integrated Master Plan describing the increased maturity of these Capabilities.