The project manager doesn’t talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the team members say, “Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!”

Tomorrow is the last day of fiscal year 2009, and you know what that means to a government contractor, don’t you. It means that you have to have all your plans in place for next year, even though the dollars haven’t shown up yet, you don’t have the staff, and the sponsor is continuing to shape the SOW. I’ve been a PMP for a number of years and while I find value in the PMBoK discipline and the common language that it provides, there’s a lot to be said for the agilist point of view. There are a slew of articles on the internet about integrating Agile with high ceremony approaches to software development. Two of the groups that I belong to on LinkedIn are the Agile CMMI (3,788 members) and the Agile Project Management Group (4,048 members). Some would say that they can’t be integrated, and others are trying to develop hybrids, but who says you can’t have both? Now I know that “Truth by analogy is fraud.” (Stroustrup) but isn’t this a bit like having an argument about whether Newtonian Mechanics or Quantum Mechanics is correct. It seems to me that Agile is just a better approach to running a software development team of skilled practitioners, and that high ceremony approaches (PMBoK, CMMI) are better at providing accountability to the customer. Agile works in short sprints, and although they may be the same length, the character of the sprint can change from the beginning of the project when you’re trying to figure out what to build, to the end of the project when you’re trying to tie all the loose pieces together and ship the product. Projects have a longer view – at least they do around here – and cover a lot more ground than just software. The unifying feature is that both sprints and projects deliver something of actual value to the customer for an expenditure of effort over a period of time, and both have measures. Agile has its burn-down charts and project velocity, and PMBoK has its EVM. Now if I can just figure out how to derive one from the other without increasing my workload, I’ll be happy. And that’s my next project.

I’ve been reading “The Strategy Paradox” by Michael Raynor, a book that Toby Elwin put me on to. The thesis of the book is that “Extreme positions in strategic space create the highest levels of profitability, but also create the highest levels of strategic risk and hence failure.” Although targeted at the commercial world there are also lessons that apply to the regulatory world. A few years ago at a safety workshop at Redondo Beach I had a beer with a safety inspector who shortly thereafter was promoted to be the principal operations inspector of a major airline. He observed that, while selection to become a PI was an important step in an ASI’s career, forever thereafter he would live in hope that his airline would avoid a major accident, because if they did have an accident his life would become one of answering questions as to why he hadn’t done this or that to forestall the event, and perhaps asking himself the same questions.

The FAA comes in for frequent lashings from NTSB , congress, and the press, and while some criticism may be justified, a good deal of it is both unfair and unhelpful to the agency’s safety mission. Although these critics presumably understand that you can’t predict the future, they continue to fall back on ineffective models of accidents being caused by an easily understood chain of events. Leaving aside the questions of what type of accident model you use, one thing is certain, it’s easier to identify the precursors of accidents after they have occurred than before – the question is how well one can reduce future risk given current knowledge. This is precisely Raynor’s point when he makes a distinction between forecasting the future with the future, and with forecasting the future with the “future present” that eventually obtains. In other words, at any given moment of time there exists a range of futures that might occur, and that is how one should evaluate the goodness of forecasting, not with what actually occurs. Given enough forecasts, someone will always turn out to have been accurate, but we don’t know at the time who that will be.

The counterpart of strategic uncertainty in a regulatory agency is the need to organize for robustness against a range of risks and hazards. This robustness comes at a price – less than optimal efficiency. The organization is working to mitigate future risks that are entirely possible but actually never transpire. That does not mean that the effort could have been better directed elsewhere — we are not working in an efficient system. One might conclude therefore that there is nothing one can do to address this issue, but Raynor goes one step further and recognizes that the issue of strategic uncertainty is tied to the time horizon. At the operational level one has a time horizon of days and weeks, while at the strategic level one has a time horizon of several years. The FAA has been labeled the “tombstone agency” but this characterization fails to distinguish its operational and strategic roles. At the operational level, there is nothing wrong, and indeed it is quite appropriate that the agency react to short term priorities and, especially, it must know how to react promptly to accidents, incidents, and other events. At the intermediate level, a process of selecting important problems and fixing them, as espoused by Malcolm Sparrow, is the appropriate course of action. But risks, by definition, are in the future, and it is at the strategic level that the agency can perform hazard identification and risk mitigation. Aviation safety already structures the organization by SMS pillars (policy, assurance, risk management, culture) and aviation system levels (national, organizational, individual), and should also structure itself according to different time horizons.

Like most people, I’ve often wondered what heaven is like – or rather, I wonder what other people think heaven is like. As a child, I suppose I believed that you’d be reunited with people who’d died, but of course, since all the people I knew who’d died seemed to be about the same age (old) I didn’t worry about what stage of life they’d be at. So what is heaven like? Are you reunited with all the people that you’ve loved or just the virtuous ones? What about pets? What about places that you loved and that have been replaced by housing developments and shopping malls?

My mother died this week, and I’m reminded of one of my favorite “old timey” songs that I first heard sung by Mike Seeger.

I am a poor wayfaring stranger
Traveling through this world of woe
But there’s no sorrow, toil, or danger
In that bright world to which I go.
I’m going there to see my mother
I’m going there no more to roam
I’m only going over Jordan
I’m only going over home.

My mother, in the last few years, was not the mother I remembered growing up with. She had developed Frontotemporal Lobe Dementia and no longer had interest in people. She recognized us, her children, but no longer had the same personality. I don’t know if she remembered who she used to be or was aware of what she had lost. Perhaps she did but no longer cared.

Last night I lay awake remembering scenes from our life growing up. Holding baby Katy, my younger sister. Cooking leg of lamb for Sunday dinner. Smoking a cigarette in the front seat of the car on our summer vacation in France. She was intensely interested in people and had a knack for spotting celebrities in the street. She had a remarkable memory for all sorts of trivia and I often wonder what she would have made of her life if she had had the opportunities that we have had. Even as an older person, I remember walking with her to the town center in Saffron Walden and stopping every few feet to talk with a neighbor or to point out where someone lived. All of this disappeared in her later years. Talking to her just seemed to annoy her. I remember calling her one day and a football match was on the telly, and though she didn’t even like football she kept it on while she gave automatic responses to my attempts to engage her in conversation.

A few years ago, when I was laid up in hospital, under the influence of some heavy duty narcotics, I had an experience which I suppose corresponds to the Zen concept of the “eternal now.” I was listening to a Haydn symphony and I heard and understood every note separately, complete in itself, weighing for eternity. I understood that the moment that I observed did not disappear into the unreachable past, but that it existed, and that though my point of view might shift, the note stood for eternity. I think Pete Townshend must have had a similar experience.

There once was a note, pure and easy,
Playing so free, like a breath rippling by.
The note is eternal, I hear it, it sees me,
Forever we blend it, forever we die.

That’s how I remember my mother. Not how she died, but how she lived her life. And that, of course, is the meaning of life

All this week Miranda, my 15 year old daughter, has been riding in with me on the commuter rail from South Acton Station to North Station in Boston, from where we take the Green Line to Government Center and the Blue Line to the Aquarium. For the first time this morning, I got off at the Porter Square stop to go to work in Kendall Square, leaving her to navigate the rest of the journey to her job as a CIT at the New England Aquarium summer camp program. It often strikes me when I ride public transportation, what a diverse set of people are in this world. Today, for example, there were buskers both at the Porter Square stop and the Harvard Square stop playing the cello – students on summer break from one of the colleges, gaining a little public exposure? Sitting on the train in front of me was a 60ish Asian gentleman with short cropped graying hair, dressed in a military jacket bearing a stars and stripes pin and a “Free Tibet” button. He held what might have been a spear, or at least some kind of stick, wrapped in an off-white fabric, and was telling beads on loop of string while softly chanting. A monk at a local temple? Next to him sat a nondescript student exploring his new iTouch – totally unremarkable these days – but what would we have made of this gadget a few years back?

Miranda has been texting me at each jump in her journey telling me where she is. There’ll be a time when I won’t be around. I wonder what she’ll see on her journeys?

The term System in Safety Management System refers to the system of controls applied to the operational processes of a certificate holder, and that produces safety as its output. This system is characterized in the three box model as a protection system, in contrast to the production system that delivers freight and passengers to their intended destinations, and the oversight system exercised by FAA. The use of the term system to describe such an assembly of processes and controls is somewhat of a stretch. To the extent that such an assembly can be called a system, it is an open system, using the terminology described by Gerald Weinberg in the standard textbook on the topic “An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.” There are multiple factors that affect safety that are not under the controls of Flight Standards and the Certificate Holder such as the environment (Canadian Geese, to mention a recent example), Technology (until recently, we did not know how to inert aviation fuel), and economics (certificate holders have to be able to stay in business). Furthermore, the output of an SMS is safety. But safety is not directly observable. To the extent that it is observable, it is as the absence of undesired outcomes. Thus it is difficult to determine whether the system is working, since the absence of events may be due to other causes than the ones under AFS and certificate holder’s control.