"Wicked" Project Management: Automating Activity Reports
November 2007
Mary Ann Malloy, The MITRE Corporation
Robert W. Miller, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
We have been exploring ways to use traditional technologies (e.g., spreadsheets,
databases, word processing) to provide automated assistance to the collection and persistence of
staff activity metadata, which we call "activity bullets." While our near-term goal is at least
semi-automated report generation, our longer-term goals include knowledge management and
reuse. This effort quickly proved to be a "wicked" problem characterized by ambiguous
requirements, uncertain solutions and risky returns on investment. In this paper, we substantiate
the "wicked" qualities of the problem, and share successes, shortfalls and lessons-learned from
our current solution approaches. We also suggest alternative, state-of-the-art mechanisms such
as semantic wikis and markup-aware mashups that are worth exploring as lightweight solutions to
automated activity reporting and to persisting derived metadata for employment in knowledge
sharing initiatives.
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Wicked problem, process re-engineering, information management, knowledge management
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