President’s Blog

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“Incident”Response Plans Are Now Accounting Controls? SEC Brings First-Ever Settled Cybersecurity Internal Controls Charges”

Did you see this blog post from Debevoise & Plimpton, the large law firm?  http://www.debevoise.com/-/media/files/insights/publications/2024/06/incident-response-plans-are-now-accounting-control.pdf
The article starts:
“In an unprecedented settlement, on June 18, 2024, the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) announced that communications and marketing provider R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. (“RRD”) agreed to pay approximately $2.1 million to resolve charges arising out of its response to a 2021 ransomware attack.”
Our ACIRM+ is a robust cyber incident response system.  Actually, what we did was add a Global […]

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Project Management Need Not Be Difficult.

When I go on sales calls, a project manager invariably says something like: “We use MS Project and some of our project plans have 1,000 or 2,500 or 3,000 tasks in them.  Can your system handle 3,000 tasks?”
A long time ago, before PCs, one of my prospects was the Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana, CA.  They were interested in my company developing a linear programming model for the Oxygen Shop.  On the last call, the Works Manager said to […]

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Project Management Quality.

Last year, I called a friend, the head of Operations at a major US Department of Defense command.  I had heard that they had a new CIO and asked my friend if he could introduce me to him.  He said that in fact, he was going on a trip with him the following week and would ask.  When he got back, he called me and said that the new CIO did not want to meet with me but, he […]

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Auditable Data. How do you know that the data are correct?

I was on a sales call years ago visiting a company west of Philadelphia.  I met with the Director in charge of project management and after socializing for a few minutes, I asked him what tool they use to manage projects.
He said: “MS Project.”
I said: “How do you like it?”
He said: “It’s great.  Every project finishes on time and on budget!”
I said: “Every one?”
He said: “Every one!!”
I said: “How can that be?”
He said: “You change the baseline plan after […]

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Managing Operations: When Waterfall the preferred project management methodology.

Let me preface this post by telling you that I have been the president of a software company for 30 years and worked for multiple technology companies before that.  I have been around a lot of developers over these many years and have heard all of the reasons / excuses why the product or feature wasn’t finished on time.  Needless to say, I have opinions about the “agile vs. waterfall” subject but that is not the subject for today’s […]

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