Stakeholder Values-Driven Project Management

Most project management culture is based on managing the construction of a defined system within contractual constraints, like deadlines and budgets. Sometimes this seems to be a focus on delivering user story-driven code production.

'Stakeholder Values-Driven Project Management.’ (For short 'Value Project Management' or VPM) has a different focus. The VPM focus is on multiple-value effectiveness improvements, for a product, service, or organization (i.e. 'transformation of effectiveness/costs', or ‘efficiency’). Uniquely, the Values are always quantified, and value improvement is incremental, early, and continuous.

Rather than constructing new systems from scratch, we normally start from the current base or existing systems, no matter how bad they are, and improve them incrementally into our dream systems. This is faster, less risky, and has a close-to-zero failure rate. This is the Evo method.

At the same time, VPM is very conscious of all constraints, and in particular, the need to meet contracted or planned constraints for calendar time and money costs. Time and Cost Management are not done by estimating a large new system and then experiencing overruns. Cost/Time management is primarily managed by incremental feedback (what is it costing to date?) and then we do incremental re-design or architecture, to reduce future costs, and reduce scaling-up costs. The engineering paradigm ‘design to cost’ has proven far more effective than conventional PM cost control methods.

Presenter: Tom Gilb was born in California, in 1940, Joined IBM in 1956, has consulted worldwide for decades and has written a lot. He still writes too much. His focus is system engineering, which software people need to adopt because software is part of a larger system!