Pinnacle's Recap on the 2017 IPM Workshop

The 29th annual IPM Workshop was held on October 30 - November 1st in Bethesda, MD.  

For many years Pinnacle has supported the College of Performance Management (CPM), International Cost Estimating And Analysis Association (ICEAA) and the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) by participating in the International Integrated Program Management (IPM) Workshop, and this year was no different. Our Practice Leader, Wendy Freeman currently serves as a Dean and our Vice President of Solution Delivery, Michael Breuker taught 3 courses in the Schedule Management Track.  

Although attendance was down this year compared to recent years in the past, we found the conference to be very valuable and a good chance to keep in touch with this community.

Some of the highlights were:

• ‘On the Shoulders of Giants’. There is a new industry collaborative effort to create a web site and timeline cataloging the history of Earned Value Management (EVM). Pinnacle has volunteered to assist with this effort through stories of experiences, contributors, and leaders who have defined our EVM community.
• Panel discussion – Leaders in the Earned Value Management (EVM) community discussed, and took questions about, the last 50 Years of EVM.
• Numerous papers and discussion on the continued integration of Agile techniques with Earned Value Management
• Papers were presented on a new Track about Business Information Modeling (BIM). BIM has been around since the 1980’s and has been heavily focused on design and design clash detection on construction programs. There was discussion exploring how these Construction best practices can be leveraged into other markets such as weapons systems development to integrate cost, schedule and technical data to include that required for design, 3D modeling, 4D Scheduling, 5D Cost Management, 6D Asset Management, and xD future dimensions.

• Panel discussion - The DOD’s Section 809 Panel is tasked with finding ways to streamline and improve the defense acquisition process. The panel has 2 years to develop recommendations for changes in regulations and associated statutes to achieve those ends.

Leave us a comment below to let us know some of your favorite moments at this years IPM Workshop.