How Do I Know?

Husband is the senior advisor for root cause analyses in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Peformance Assessments and Root Cause Analyses. He is a retired Air Force officer with a doctorate in chemical engineering from Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He is grateful to Gary Bliss, Bob Jennings, Mike Ginter, John Mueller and Ed McDermott for helpful discussions and for providing examples of schedule-driven practices they have observed. Acquisition professionals know that program schedules should be established via “eventdriven” planning. But what is the distinction between a scheduleversus an event-driven program? The author proposes that schedule-driven programs are distinguished not by whether they are behind schedule or have little margin, but by how management sets and controls schedules.