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Course reflection

  Good course, thanks Dr. Aguilar.  I found a few good nuggets to take away from this course.  One of them was the ethics discussions.  Every course that I have taken in my educational journey has stressed ethics.  This course in particular stressed the communication aspect of ethics. I liked that, it was a refreshing change to a topic that is stressed extremely high in the business and the management community.  I also liked the discussions on the topic of communicating across boundaries.  This is indeed a problem space in the management and corporate community.  This course helped me personally to understand the underlying problem and help me formulate ways that I as a project manager can help to facilitate change.  Specifically I can apply the tenets of bridging the communication gap by creating well documented communication plans for the projects that I manage.  One of the ways I am immediately using my new information is by holding weekly stakeholder meetings to communica
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Innovation

Innovation is all around us.  It is the catalyst for creativity and new products, services and, my favorite, new weapons systems.  Why would I want new weapons systems?  Well primarily it has been the core of my employment existence since I was 18 and joined the Navy. New weapons and creativity are the lifeblood of American industry.  Just look at the history of the industrial revolution in the early 1900s and then compare to the rise of the military industrial complex in WWII.  Since then, much of the industry in our great nation surrounds the needs of the military for new weapons systems that espouse the tenets of innovation.  From guns, to radar, to missiles to warships.  The military industry employs hundreds of thousands of people.  One program that I was recently on (F-35) employed over 100,000 people in different aspects of the program world wide.  That is amazing, and what drove it all?  The new and different innovations contained within the weapons platform of a 5th generati
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Stovepipes of Excellence

   Powers was correct, it is difficult to communicate across boundaries.  It is hard to break down paradigms that are present within teams.  To truly have effective communication across boundaries you have to get buy in from stakeholders and break the "stove pipes of excellence"  barrier.  You know what that is, it is where groups of people who have formed teams that are successful do not want to share information.  It happens all the time, and it is completely natural.  Most teams and even individuals within a team treat their knowledge very parochial and do not want to share.  It takes buy in and trust to communicate effectively outside of your organization, and even then most people hold information back.     As an example take the situation that I am currently in.  My company has a major project that crosses the boundaries of all four sectors.  The project capitalizes on each sectors strengths so that the end product is the best that it can be.  Sounds easy huh?  But it
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DIKA and the OODA Loop

  As I sit here and think about the DIKA Model, I wonder what DIKA utopia would look like.  To me it would be a company that embraces the model from top to bottom almost as much as they do AGILE or ISO 9000.  But in my case, I have not experienced DIKA in any organized fashion.  My experiences are highly disorganized and could be improved upon if there were the correct manpower assets and time needed to correct the communication problems and data repositories needed to employ an effective DIKA process.  Instead of effective utopian DIKA process my company uses dysfunctional data elements in non-consolidated locations to share needed information that is important to the success of programs.  I consider it in-efficient and it slows the performance of the program.  To be effective the DIKA process has to be employed in full, not leaving any part of the process out.    My company employs part of the process great, that is the Action portion of the process, but without the Data and Informa
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DIKA Presentation

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DIKA Trial

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DIKA Assignment

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