Performance Based Earned Value
It has been very interesting reviewing Paul Solomon’s Performance Based Earned Value. It is in many ways consistent with SEER’s monitoring and control. It preaches looking at quality in addition to quantity of work performed as well as capturing the issues of deferred functionality. I should point out that we sometimes called SEER’s Monitoring & Control Performance Based Earned Value before we realized it was trademaked. Since we have stuck with 4 dimensional earned value for SEER.
PBEV has 16 guidelines in addition to the 32 included in the EIA 748 earned value standard. Read more
Why SEER Got Started
Many years ago a project was never developed because of my realistic estimate. I wondered if I had done the right thing, which was try to provide an achievable project plan and a realistic estimate, even though that estimate was longer than the company desired. This experience made me wonder if I had failed as a manager. However, some years later I tried to reproduce this estimate using SEER-SEM and discovered that I had significantly underestimated the project. SEER-SEM enabled me to understand that I had not failed and that my refusal to give in to the division head’s pressure had been the best thing for that company. Read more
The Total Ownership Cost of IT Systems
It is interesting to see how the much of the industry speaks of IT system cost problems while ignoring a large part of the problem. Software maintenance can be 75+% of software total ownership costs but IT Infrastructure and IT services can be 60% of the total ownership cost itself. Even if we use cloud computing most of those IT service costs don’t go away. Help desk, data conversion, etc. is still a problem, even in the cloud. Read more
Estimating Is Not A Problem
I spoke with someone recently who had seen a survey that showed estimating was not a problem. I was interested in that. With cost and schedule overruns being the norm, and deferred functionality so often being the means of delivery, why people would not think estimating was a problem.
It occurs to me that those persons may not have gone thru the root cause analysis of their project difficulties. Estimation is the basis of an achievable plan. And that achievable plan, factoring in risk should yield more successful projects. However if success is defined as fact free planning, then estimation is not a problem, the entire process is.
GAO Cost Assessment Guidebook
The GAO cost assessment Guidebook is something you should keep an eye on if you work in the government environment at all. And if you are in a commercial business there are some good tidbits in there for you as well. As I understand it the guidebook was originally intended to support auditors. Then its scope was expanded to provide a consistent methodology and identification of best practices for both government and industry for developing and managing program cost estimates. I, along with a cadre of others have been providing review and feedback.
The guide lists a 12 step estimating process and guidance in numerous areas. While it is still a work in process I am generally pleased with it at this point. The July 2008 draft can be found at GAO Cost draft.
One area I was especially interested in included, a 5 level scale of estimating maturity. They originally had three levels. That just didn’t seem consistant with machuriy scales. I send them the CECIM work done in the UK on estimation process. And I believe a 5 level scale has now been Incorporated.
Experience Is What You Get When You Didn’t Get What You Wanted: Lessons Learned Review For Estimating
Another reason to measure and record lessons learned…. Even is a project is not successful, lessons learned and measurements can teach valuable lessons for the future.
Real lessons learned that are applied to imporve processes and decision making for the future are paramont to estimating and project management overall. Read more
Socalizing An Estimate
We are sometimes asked how to “socialize an estimate”…. That is a great question. According to dictionary.com socializing is “to treat as a group activity.” What a great idea.. getting stakeholders involved in the estimate process as well as applying the estimate to project plans. Socializing the estimate means it is not just a one time event that is thrown in the corner but a cornerstone of project planning. An provides the groundrules and assumptions as well as the results and risks for the viewing (and sometimes changing) by those involved. Of course the changing needs to be controlled so we don’t have stakeholders attempting to drive down the schedule or cost by making arbitrary changes. That is why SEER for Software provides versioning and configuration management of estimates.
I still shutter when I recall some time ago, a program manager who stated that he had nothing to do with the estimate… that others produced them and he ignored them.. he generated a plan completely independent of the estimate. That is more than just a shame. Socializing estimates can mitigate that. And help ensure project managers and other take ownership.
The Cost of Cloud in the Sky Computing Part 1
Looking at ways to increase IT infrastructure without worrying about power, heat, space and other constraints…. Cloud in the sky computing (or cloud computing) may be an upcoming solution. Cloud in the sky essentially is buying
Amazon Web Services is an example. Costs, as I understand them are about $0.10 per hour of usage plus storage costs at $.15 per gig per month for a clone of an HP Tower server. If an application is hosted and not used there is no cost. Not bad. I suppose we could add to the advantages that they back up the whole system without you worrying about it. On the other hand, your data is out of your control.
Galorath recently did a study of the costs / benefits of force.com, Salesforce’s environment with some similarities to Amazon. I need to find out if our results are publishable. But I can tell you we found force. com to be attractive in the appropriate environment.
We will use SEER for IT to do a general analysis of cloud versus local computers soon.
Code is Poetry?
As I was writing a BLOG entry I saw a new version of the blogging software was available. Being somewhat of a geek myself I went to look at the change list.. i wanted to see if some of the things that drive me crazy have been fixed. At the bottom of the page i saw the phrase “code is poetry” Having a background in software development this comment put a smile on my face. I have worked with all types of developers. Some say “if it is working it is good, don’t change it” While there is some truth to that… changing code often introduces new defects, there is certainly some risk as well. As code may be error prone or unmaintainable, or can be made to execute more quickly (such as the latest release of SEER which writes to the database an order of magnitude faster.) But should good code be changed just to make it read better? Using SEER for Software I can see a potential of 20 to 50% of development or more just to ensure we have made anything go wrong.
Yet re-factoring old systems can sometimes product great improvements in maintainability.
I bagan to think of the analogy of code to electronic circuitry. Is electronics poetry? I don’t think so. It is sound (hopefully) engineering. i think the same is true for software. Code is an engineering product, not poetry.
SEER for IT: The Making of a New Product and Lessons learned
Measurement certainly requires looking to the past to learn of the future. But there is a huge amount to be learned from the lessons learned themselves. Looking back on the SEER for IT development there are several lessons learned that go beyond just the measurements. Read more