Relationships in project systems

NASA, Mercury to Apollo

Any good teams have belonging, pride, group, and an element of spontaneity to them

More cultural and organizational view

Brought in the “Whiz Kids”

using statistical techniques to improve efficiency

More technical and optimization focused

Work Breakdown Structure

1

a decomposition of work

tree structure

identifies “terminal elements”

Waterfall

Each step still has a verification

There are feedback loops

Similar to the System Engineering V

If you remove the left to right assumption of sequential steps, it looks a lot like agile

Dependencies

if there are no dependencies, does it need to be managed?

Precedence relationships

Finish to start, finish to finish, start to start, etc

similar to necessary / sufficiency relationships

Finish to finish is like necessary but not sufficient

QFD

rows are tasks / activities

can identify sequential, parallel and coupled task sets

dimensions

left to right

top to bottom

networks

size

etc

what’s interesting is if you can have visualizations that communicate more value per dimension

dependence, sequence, connectivity, terminal, initial are all communicated

it’s “easy” to add dimensions

Bryan Moser ideas of dependence

precedence is a result not a cause

dependence as “area of demand”

can represent dependency between processes with a 2d chart where each axis is the time progress on each task

if there is no dependence, all paths from start (bottom left) to end (top right) are available

dependence represented as a “bottom-right” space of the chart

route of actual work and proximity to “area of demand” indicates how efficient the actual work is

also how fragile the coupling is

can represent mutual dependencies with a dependence area on the “top-left” space

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this is a very interesting idea related to Visualizations as dimensions