People don't know that they're going to deliver late. I've worked with multi-billion dollar companies and individuals, and often when someone says "I can deliver that on-time," they genuinely believe it. As project managers, it's important for us to interrogate that assertion and break down the path to completion with enough detail to see when tasks start to slip.

I've had the rare privilege of managing an aircraft development program from early drawings on napkins through first-flight approval. During that time I had the most effective of feedback loops: living with the consequences of my choices earlier in the process. Due to the holiday on Wednesday, today is my only post this week.

When confronted with a new role at work, I often review the existing instructions, procedures, and templates. Frequently, I have found them out-of-date and involving wasteful steps. To pass on things better than I found them, I try to leave an impact through making process improvements and updating those documents.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a manager in possession of a project, must be in want of a project schedule ( With apologies to Jane Austen ). On large projects for the US government there is an "Integrated Master Schedule" (IMS). The IMS is often used as a report deliverable, and so is updated monthly for the customer to see it. I have found that the IMS is most useful as a working document. This is for two reasons: 1) it saves me all of the time to update the IMS for the customer because it's already updated for me, and 2) the IMS is recommended for a reason, and I try to take full advantage of it. 1937 Panama Canal schedule My peak time using IMS as a tool was doing new product introductions for military landing gears. At that time I had several simultaneous projects, all requiring Department-of-Defense-compliant Integrated Master Schedules, which included a 14-point compliance check as well as a variety of metrics that defined the "health" ...

As I've been looking for my next role, I've had to think about what my "ideal job" might look like. I've also had to think about what my "superpower" is: what I uniquely bring to a hiring organization. I don't know that I have a complete answer, but I reached a few conclusions recently. My ideal job is to take on a broken-but-fixable organization and bring it to where it doesn't need heroism to survive day-to-day. My superpower is to create the organizational bandwidth to make that happen.

I've gotten a broad view of the various aircraft out there today, and have been involved in the design or manufacture of many too. All photos are mine or public domain.

This is the fourth of a series of posts about tools I've built or used to make life easier. Although I did make a new Excel spreadsheet to keep it all organized, Change Board was more about how I prepared for, ran, and followed up on meetings than the tool itself. I know this because I passed the tool on for others to use and when I was invited to see others using it their meetings didn't feel as crisp. Change Board feels like something that shouldn't be especially difficult, but I've seen lots of programs with nonfunctional Change Boards. Previous posts in the series: Overlap tool Follow-up through Outlook, OneNote, and To Do RFQ / CBF SAP tool Increased Scope Means More Change Board I hosted my first Change Boards when I became a Program Manager. Initially that meant small direct-ship programs (the parts never touched our docks, just shipped directly to the customer) with minimal design changes and stable schedules. I used the format that the previous Program Man...