Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

I attended the monthly dinner meeting of the PMI Washington D.C. Chapter yesterday at the Tysons Corner Sheraton. The speaker was Lee Evey who was the Program Manager for the 10-year, $4 Billion Pentagon Renovation Program. A group of colleagues from the AOL Open Services Project Management team also attended (thanks Don for sponsoring the table and Owen/Cindy for coordinating!). Everyone agreed that it was a great talk and the speach was very motivating, apolitical, and provided some good pointers for leading teams in crises. Even though this particular domain was the construction industry, almost all of the lessons learned can be applied to software project management in general. Interestingly, before the Pentagon renovation program, Lee was responsible for negoatiating the Space Shuttle and International Space Station contracts! Lee spoke in a very casual manner, walked around in the audience and his talk was often interspersed with funny comments and anecdotes. Some notes from the meeting:

- The renovation project was the largest renovation program in the history of the US. The program started in 1997 and some of the renovations such as re-inforced blast-proof windows, etc were instrumental in saving lives on 9/11.

- Pentagon construction started on 9/11/1941 -- and exactly 60 years after that the terrorist attack happened.

- Lee's team treated the attack as a Program issue and rallied together as a team to clean-up the crash site within a month (outside estimates put the clean-up effort at 6-8 months!)

- Not surprisingly, 'people' were the key to the success of the program. Every week Lee made it a point to start from the top floor and work his way to the basement --personally thanking construction workers and shaking their hands. Such small gestures went a long way towards ensuring team-work and success.

- Lee used some innovative contract negotiation and structuring techniques. There was a fixed-price incentive based on the contractor meeting certain performance requirements. The prime contractor was required to implement such incentives with the sub-contractors all the way down to the individual teams.

- Lee made sure the goals were clear and concise -- the performance  requirements document, which used to be around 35,000 pages, was condensed to a succinct 16 pages!

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