It’s been a while since my last blog here, although I have a few in UC Santa Cruz Extensions. But today I wanted to give a brief update on the use of Commitment-Based Project Management, CBPM for short.
In January I presented the approach to a standing-room only audience at PMI Silicon Valley. There was tremendous interest and one of the attendees brought me into his company to consult and train on the approach. I visited in February, we ran a series of map days, and came up with a challenging but doable plan. Unfortunately, attention was taken off the effort due to other priorities and four weeks later, when they asked me to come again, things were late and we had to do a reset.
What this shows is that while coming up with a good plan is a great start, we all know that you have to stay on top of the effort or things will slip, regardless of how good the method is. I’m working with them to reset the plan and get the execution back on schedule.
In the meantime, I heard from one of the PMs who worked in my project with my prior employer and he’s been able to use CBPM successfully there, although he is forced to use MS Project to capture the plan and track the project. Don’t get me wrong, while I think MS Project can be overkill, it has some great features that are needed, such as the ability to capture dependencies. My spreadsheet allows the user to enter dependencies but it’s not the best approach. Something to mull about in my spare time on how to fix.
I have added Cost Performance Index and Schedule Performance Index calculations for Earned Value Management to the spreadsheet. Let me know if you are interested in this version. I’m still investigating how to automate it even more and I’m making some progress with VBA for Excel but that’s slow going.
How are you using CBPM? Let us know!