How Big is the Space Economy? Probably around $415 billion, 79 percent is commercial. Another breakdown is 58 percent consumer services, 33 percent manufacturing and launch, and 9 percent satellite operations. NASA funding was about 0.7 percent of GDP in 1960s and only 0.1 percent today.
PMI’s Practice Standard for WBS – Disappointing Treatment of Agile. A good question: “Why would an agile team want to use a WBS, anyway? Doesn’t the Agile Manifesto value working software over comprehensive documentation?”
The Boeing Co Starliner spacecraft that failed to hit the right orbit to reach the International Space Station is healthy, in a stable orbit and expected to land in New Mexico on Sunday morning.
China has officially commissioned its first domestically-built aircraft carrier, the Shandong. Yes, but what about their operations?
Why Russian military expenditure is much higher than commonly understood (as is China’s). PPP conversion for 2018: China ~$475 billion, Russia ~$160 billion. Market exchange rate: China ~$250 billion, Russia ~65 billion. I agree that PPP is a better measure.
Related: The Chinese Navy Is Building An Incredible Number Of Warships
Protect Your Data Or Lose DoD Business: Maj. Gen. Murphy. Potential area of backlash to use of OTAs and other rapid acquisition processes.
Life in a post-JMS world: U.S. Space Superiority powered by ‘Agile’ Acquisitions. OT&E on Joint Space Operational Center Mission System: “…not operationally effective or suitable for its space awareness mission…”
Comparison of cost and construction times of first metro lines in Asia. Cost — Shanghai Line 1: $18.6M per km. Dhaka Line 6: $139M per km. Construction speed — Shanghai LIne 1: 1.31 km per year. Lahore Orange Line, 6.02 km per year. (Dhaka Line 6 two spots behind at 3.7 km per year.) So China is cheapests/slowest while south Asia is most expensive/fastest.
Related from Patrick Collison: Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together. And some times on nuclear reactor + Nautilus.
DARPA Director Steven Walker stepping down.
The Pentagon has created a “Cadre of Pricing Experts” to identify pricing trends for spare parts and suppliers that should be monitored to prevent a continued “assault on the American taxpayers,” according to chief weapons buyer Ellen Lord… Reverse engineering explored to reduce dependence on suppliers.
Did Congress just cut competition out of the Army’s Bradley replacement program? A slice: “The Army intends to award up to two contracts for the [optionally manned fighting vehicle] OMFV [middle-tier acquisition (rapid prototyping)] effort phase in the spring of 2020.”
New approaches in federal contracting. Panel from GMU Center for Gov’t Contracting Symposium with DAU.
Thanks for the link to the PMI/agile critique, Eric. I think Chad Millette is exactly right that the PMI folks are talking through their hats. (This is closely related to the problem of test planning for agile developments, which I have tried to grapple with in the past.)
Here’s my take:
1. You need a WBS for the Minimum Viable Product, because how you get to the MVP looks a lot like a traditional waterfall development where one of the requirements is that the architecture be suited to ongoing agile upgrades.
2. Once you have an MVP, going agile is effectively switching from defined deliverable to defined effort. For project management purposes, for a given sprint you don’t have to estimate how much you are going to spend and how long it will take, because you have fixed those values in advance. What you don’t know in advance is what you’re going to get for your time and money.
3. The last remaining unknown is how long you’re going to continue to sprint. That’s the part that might require a savvy project manager to make some informed guesses.
I’m surprised that I haven’t heard more people talk about agile as a level-of-effort approach. Have you?
Agree. Agile really is a level-of-effort approach… I like the framing that the MVP is waterfall which informs the LOE after that. Besides some stuff I’ve written over the years, I haven’t heard anyone explicitly say Agile –> LOE. Of course, the other side of that is Waterfall –> Lifecycle Cost Estimate.
Happy to collaborate on an article if you’re so interested!
I’ve been sitting on a post about costing for rapid acquisition which makes the same point. Perhaps it’s time to schedule it.
“To properly match the contractor effort with a new [agile] development approach, a “level of effort” for prime development labor was adopted.”
https://www.dau.edu/powerful-examples/Blog/Powerful-Example–F-22-Program-Office-uses-DevOps-on-a-Hardware-Platform
The list of fast projects is very interesting and informative. As you know, I’ve done a lot of work on schedule estimation and schedule growth, and why things take so long. It’s very instructive to look back at fast things and try to understand which ones got around the various barriers to speed, and which ones simply didn’t face them. For example, the wartime projects were allowed to take risks and exercise authorities that are simply impossible now. (My favorite example of that is the two weeks that the residents of Pine Point were given to move out when they were evicted to make room for a shipyard…)
I would argue that a recurring theme of the success stories was that they chose to produce something useful as quickly as possible, rather than producing something that would hopefully meet a bunch of aspirational threshold requirements.
Thanks for the comment! Yes, getting early test articles out ASAP, showing progress to FM people, and gaining user support, is critical.
Wartime doesn’t always bring out the best. River Run’s B-17 plant was continually behind schedule. The whole process presumed that there would be a stable specification, but the AF kept changing specs which led to rearranging the production line, etc. Eventually they settled on building a standard model (MVP?) which then was sent to outfitting locations for mods. So even in the hardware production case, you can see some inklings of breaking things down and iterating.