Ventana software support forum

Fabian H. Szulanski wrote:
>
> Hello Chris,
> There is one case that I recall, it is related with a legal battle
> between the US State and a ship building company called Halter Marine,

The original work was done by Pugh-Roberts and involved building a
project model to support a claim by Halter Marine against a customer.
Later, Kim Reichelt (a consultant with Pught Roberts) wrote an MIT Sloan
School Masters Thesis that took a retrospective look at the
ramifications on Halter of bringing a large law suit.

Pugh-Roberts has done many models for use in litigation. If you add up
all the cases, the total sum of money involved must be in the many
billions of dollars by this time. These models are usually models of
projects (e.g. ships, power plants, missile programs) which involve a
contractor seeking compensation for cost over-runs from a customer (e.g.
the U.S. Navy). Typically, the contractor alleges that
customer-requested changes resulted in "delay and disruption" of the
entire project and perhaps even affected other projects going on at the
same time. The result is that the cost overrun greatly exceed the
simple direct (i.e. staff and materials) cost of the changes.

The project model framework, which underlies almost all of this
litigation, was developed by Pugh-Roberts and a remarkable manager, Rich
Goldbach (now of Metro Machine), in support of a claim that Ingals
Shipyard had against the U.S. Navy. The Pugh Roberts people involved
were Ken Cooper (now president of Pugh Robers), Henry Wiel (now at MIT)
and David Peterson (now at Ventana). The project model is considered a
classic framework in the field, and is used not only in litigation but
in project management as well.

Ken Cooper wrote an article about the first project model and, more
recently, a series of three articles about insights that Pugh Roberts
has gotten into project management. Tarik Abel-Hamid (now at the Naval
Post Graduate School) wrote an MIT doctoral thesis on project management
in software, which he later published as a book with Stuart Madnick
(MIT). Terik has written a number of articles about managing software
projects.

Regards,
Jim Hines
LeapTec and MIT
From: Jim Hines <jimhines@interserv.com>