DAU collaborates with NASA: sharing stories with like-minded leaders in program and project management - Knowlddge Sharing - Defense Acquisition University

Program Manager, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Todd Post

Terry Little has plenty of stories to tell-and well he should. During his sterling career as a civilian program manager in the Air m Force, he has learned a lot about managing large missile programs; and, like any true leader, wants to share some of that with the people who can benefit from it most. That's why we publish him regularly in ASK Magazine, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) publication about program and project management.

That's right, NASA, the space people--but don't think for a moment this magazine is meant for just NASA. In each issue we feature project leaders from industry and other government agencies. ASK content is mostly about managing large complex projects, usually about technology doing some amazing thing, and that general purpose objective is why we've sought out contributions from people like Terry Little.

Thanks to DAU

As the ASK editor, I feel compelled to say thank you to the Defense Acquisition University (DAU). Nowhere have we gotten as much high-quality material outside of our NASA sources as from our friends at DAU. Terry Little is just one of those with a DAU affiliation.

Many at DAU know about ASK, but not all, I suspect. So, if you are unfamiliar with ASK, or would like to understand how this relationship developed, let me tell you about it. Here is the ASK story.

The Roots of ASK

ASK is published bimonthly by NASA's Academy of Program and Project Leadership (APPL) as part of its Knowledge Sharing Initiative (KSI). I'm involved in other parts of KSI--more on KSI later--although my primary responsibility is to edit ASK Magazine. I collect stories from the best program and project managers around, and from any practitioner who has knowledge to share and an inclination to tell a story ASK content is generally in the form of stories told by program and project managers describing their own experiences. Surely anybody who's been managing long enough has stories to tell.

APPL Program Director Dr. Edward J. Hoffman has always believed that NASA program and project managers are best served by knowing how projects are managed elsewhere. How do peers in other places deal with large budgets, lengthy schedules, and complicated organizations among ocher things?

Terry Little was an obvious choice when we were looking for contributors outside of NASA. Besides his remarkable accomplishments as a manager, Little is known for his plainspoken candor, and this fit the tone Hoffman and ASK Editor-in-Chief Dr. Alexander Laufer wanted to set with ASK. Little accepted their invitation to provide a story for the first issue of ASK in January 2001. Since then, he has had a story in every issue.

Little was hardly an unknown quantity when he was invited to write for ASK. Hoffman and Laufer had worked with him before. ASK Magazine is an offshoot of a project they had begun in the late '90s, culminating in their book, Project Management Success Stories: Lessons of Project Leadership (Wiley, 2000). Using the same model as ASK, they collected stories from a variety of project leaders in government and private industry In all, they collected 70 stories by 36 different project managers, including Little.

Stories as Teaching Tools

Why a story? To put it bluntly the best project managers manage from the gut; they know what to do to drive a project toward success not because of what they've read in a management text, but what they know works based on years of experience, nurtured over a career of ups and downs, successes and failures, trial and error.

How does one convey this kind of knowledge to a peer or junior colleague? Reach for formulas or the latest theories and the words seem incompatible with the meaning of the experience. But start telling a story-let me tell you about what happened to me-and if the listeners have been anywhere near that kind of experience before, they will recognize the terrain and identify with the meaning on a tacit level.

In Project Management Success Stories, Hoffman and Laufer began with one basic premise. Practitioners themselves are generally the most qualified teachers of other practitioners, and the best way for practitioners to learn from one another is by listening to them describe shared types of experiences.

A significant body of scholarship supports the use of stories as a way to convey lessons learned. Using stories in this way was not new when Hoffman and Laufer began in Project Management Success Stories, but no management book before this had used storytelling so deliberately to examine the nuances of project management.

Laufer, in particular, has been challenging the status quo of what makes a successful project manager for many years before he began work on Project Management Success Stories. In his book, Simultaneous Management (Wiley, 1997), he began collecting stories to support his findings that the best project managers know more than they can tell using the formal vocabulary of scholarship. In many cases, the best way for them to make manifest their knowledge is to simply start describing their experiences.