Pinnacle Insights

McLean, VA (June 8, 2022) – Network Designs Inc. (NDi) announces a $32 Million contract was awarded by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the Regulation and Certification Infrastructure for System Safety (RCISS) and FAA Critical Infrastructure for System Safety (FCISS) strategic initiatives of the FAA’s Capital Investment Programs (CIPs).

Thank you to all of the students who submitted essays for our 2022 Project Management Scholarship. The theme this year was "Where do you see Project Management in 10 years?" Congratulations to Ken Nguyen, whose winning essay we are proud to publish below.

Projects play a critical role in the progress of a company. Their success can facilitate entry into new markets, implement cutting edge technologies, or activate long awaited operational assets. Conversely, their failure can stifle progress, aggravate timelines, disrupt strategies, or herald a firm’s disappearance altogether.  

Custom Hooks are a Deltek Cobra feature that allow you to do some custom manipulation of data during various processes that Deltek Cobra runs. Custom hooks can be built using Visual FoxPro scripts or compiled procedures, Visual Basic or C# executables. Visual FoxPro is nearing the end of its lifecycle so organizations with Custom Hooks built using Visual FoxPro should consider re-implementing them in Visual Basic or C#.

We’ve recently been working with an Aerospace contractor who manages their project schedules using Oracle Primavera P6. On one of their programs, their customer must be provided with a copy of the P6 schedule in Microsoft Project native mpp format each month. To do this, we have assisted the contractor in setting up a monthly process for conversion and validation of the P6 schedule into the mpp format.

Much has been written about how complicated and difficult Earned Value Management (EVM) can be, and a term that has grown in popularity in response to this perception is “EVM Lite.” One of the problems with the term “EVM Lite” is that it suggests a version of EVM that is incomplete in some way. 

Earned Value Management (EVM) is not a perfect fit for all types of projects. For example, short-term projects, low risk projects, or projects using agile development techniques may not benefit from a full Earned Value Management System (though they may still benefit from a scaled or tailored EVMS). But for most projects, where there is a risk to on-time, on-budget delivery, and where cost and schedule need to be managed, earned value management benefits the project greatly. 

Continuing with part four of a four-part blog series, I have been writing about preparing for an Integrated Baseline Review (IBR), and how unnerving and time-consuming it is as your team is collecting data, preparing Control Account Manager (CAM) notebooks, and sitting in mock interviews.