So you're asking who is David Schmaltz and what has he done? David is the author of the book The Blind Men and the Elephant, Mastering Project Work. It's a great book on the essence and the challenges of project work. One of the indicators of how great any work is we can see in who lines up as advocates and detractors. David has more than his fair share of both. I'm guessing that his latest article will produce the same effect. David, just for the record, count me in as one of your advocates!

David's latest piece The Planning Wars, appearing on June 30, 2005 in Projects @ Work uses the project "Operation Iraqi Freedom" to explore the misconceptions and "inescapable truths" of project planning and management. He does a good job of side-stepping the politics of the situation. (Congratulations David!) As usual for David, the writing is very good. It's tight and engaging.

I hesitate to recap his article. Take the time to read it, digest it, and share it with others. And after you do, please share your reactions with David and readers of Reforming Project Management.

One key objective of lean is reducing waste. Doing so requires paying attention to surroundings and assessing something as waste. There's nothing like an everyday example to show the behaviors that we need to work lean. Joe Ely's unbuttoned view of the world is just what we need for becoming lean. He sees one lean example after another in his everyday interactions.

Joe's latest posting Fizzy Coke at "Learning about Lean" warns of passing along faults or flaws. He uses a rather common experience (told in an uncommon way) to show both the desired behavior and the thinking behind that behavior. As usual for Joe, he's provided an accessible example for learning about lean. Read Joe's examples and begin developing and sharing your own.

I'm trying something new. I've invited readers to author postings for Reforming Project Management. The first one appeared today. You'll see others soon. Send me an email if you are interested in expressing your views on these pages. I'll ask you about your story ideas. We'll discuss your how often you want to post. Once is fine. More often is better.

As a practicing project manager, I spend a lot of time swimming among reams of data - status reports, time sheets, change requests, vendor contracts, performance reports, issue logs, action items, etc. etc.

How much of this really matters?

I believe that there are few really critical success factors for projects:

1. You must have a clear and definite scope.
2. You must have executive support.
3. You must have a committed team (meaning allocation to the project as well as emotional commitment).

What are the clearest, most economical, and most effective indicators of these factors? Shouldn't these be what you should pay the most attention to in order to manage a project successfully?

I would like your opinions on this. I think a large number of scope changes approved for a project indicate both a poor scope, and poor support from the executives. What is a better indicator of resource commitment? Is it the percent allocated and tracking to the project, or is the number of tasks started and completed each week? How do you track executive support? Attendance at steering committee meetings? Willingness to freeze changes? Turn-around-time on deliverable reviews and acceptance? Willingness to implement risk mitigation steps?

What constitutes the 'thin-slice,' as Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, puts it, that provides the project manager with the rapid cognition of not only the health and well-being of the project, but also feeds the PM's intuition regarding the right next steps for both preventive and corrective actions?