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About the Book

What is 'Governeering' about?

This book is about any class of government planning by politicians, and civil servants, for the public, media, civil servants.

This book is for areas like social services, health, military, police, urban planning, transport, recreation, museums, emergencies, ‘UN Sustainability Goal’ 17 areas of planning, development planning, environmental planning, contracting, bidding, reviewing, and charities.

We are particularly concerned with managing the non-financial services, the values, and the qualities expected by citizens and stakeholders, for example security, health and privacy. Because, if these values are not as clear and quantified as the associated budget numbers, we will not get the value levels delivered in practice. But we might blow the budget trying.

This book is for areas of planning which are not currently served by a well-developed engineering tradition. The book is for areas where highly-unstructured, badly-defined sentences are, unfortunately, the main means of communicating the planning ideas.

It is not for specialist disciplines such as road building, site construction, weapons development, etc., where well-developed engineering and scientific tradition, already supply the need for a rigorous discipline.

The purpose of this book is to define, present, and make credible, a better-structured discipline of planning, than is currently normal.

My hope is that YOU as an individual become a little more enlightened about planning, and that some of YOU are inspired to study these ideas more deeply, and that some of YOU will improve your own projects, and an amazing few of YOU will change your organization’s planning culture, or ‘the world’. I even wish well, those who can improve their career, their reputation, and their wealth using these ideas! Be greedy for better knowledge, share it freely, and hope you get even more in return. It is FUN, you know?

A big opportunity is staring you in the face. All you have to do is decide to learn more, try ideas out. The next bad plan you see is a golden opportunity. The bad plan might even be your own, so fix it before colleagues read this book. Be diplomatic about it! People who made that plan did the best they could, and they might like to make ‘their plan’ better, if you offer some humble help.

Don’t criticize or change ‘their’ plan. Be there for them as friend and coach to help them do it themselves.

Improve your own plans first, and set a good example. Amaze colleagues with clear plans! Just one clear objective to start. Today?

The aim is that public planning will:

1. Be clear, more intelligible for all concerned

2. Be more complete, integrated, agile-friendly, and digital-friendly

3. Be more logical with regard to decision-making, traceability, priorities, risks, and the need to change. 4. Result in more ‘stakeholder value’, delivered earlier

5. And result in less costs of public money, time, and people - to build and maintain the planned systems.

TOContent

0. Introduction

Planalysis: How to analyze plans.
Planning QC: How to subject plans to rigorous quality control and review,
Planning Standards
Stakeholder Analysis (Requirement Sources)
Objectives (and all notions of Requirements): Future States, Visions, Value, Qualities
Strategies:
Decomposition: Intelligible Value Increments:
Resources: costs, time, estimation, design to Cost
Evo: Agile Project Value and Cost Management
Risk Management
Ethical Planning

Glossary References

About the Author

Tom Gilb

@ImTomGilb

Tom Gilb has been consulting on management problems, for top management since 1962. As a result he has developed and refined his own powerful methods for management planning. He has worked for many of these years with his son Kai Gilb.

These methods are jointly called ‘Planguage’ – a Planning Language. They are unique in helping managers to think quantitatively about the qualitative aspects of their decisions. For example how to quantify ‘engineering productivity’, or general product quality?

Most of the consultancy work is done at the CTO level. Most of it is for technical multinationals, and some financial groups. Most of the work is for planning organizational improvement in productivity and quality (for 10,000 engineers for example). The rest is about big projects (like 1,000 engineers, $100 million).

Tom does not profile himself as a management consultant. In fact he works at the grass roots of advanced engineering, systems, software, aircraft, IT, telecoms, electronics.

This often leads to meeting top managers who appreciate his methods, and become clients. There is a well-documented successful spread of his methods at HP, IBM (CMM 4) and Intel (20,000 engineers trained there in his methods). Other interesting famous method-user organizations are Boeing, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Philips, Ericsson, Nokia, Tata Consultancy, Microsoft, Equinor and many others, smaller and less famous.

In June 2024 Nicholas Coutts at GilbFest #25 told us of over 220 startup projects with 3 year success rate of 83% using Toms Planguage (Competitive Engineering) ideas, as a clear causal contributor. See "Some examples of technology for good”

https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26703.09126 This made me prouder than all the big corporations we helped! I worked with him directly on some of these startups.

Tom has been invited to lecture at dozens of universities worldwide (including Berkeley, Stanford, London School of Economics, Imperial College).

He has previously published nine paper books. The 2005 book is ‘Competitive Engineering’.

He has spent 2 years (2014-2015) working on his new book ‘Value Planning’, especially for top managers. Published initially on LeanPub 2016.

In 2018-2024 He produced about 35+ books digitally.About 5 annually. Most at Leanpub, or Gilb.com or https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tom-Gilb (with quite a few papers, slides, experiments, older book chapters etc.). It is his way of leaving good technical ideas behind, for when professionals grow to need and appreciate them even better!

In 2020, long course-length videos were made by Oslo Software Architecture (OSWA), based on the SEA Systems Enterprise Architecture book https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb508f8y_d0PqRZKPCVVVxQ,

And many long videos about the books were made by BCS SPA SG such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaBhijqVWYA for the Sustainability Planning book.

and

BCS made: Value Requirements video 22 April 2020, 3 hours

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHrwQtG6IMw&list=PLKBhokJ0qd3_wlvr0j85YhmNfNj8ZJ8M-

and many other of my book videos are below this one on that site.

In 2012 he was made Honorary Fellow of the British Computer Society.

More information, and many publications, at gilb.com. A 'Tom Gilb' search will tell about things not mentioned here.

He lives in Norway, near Oslo, in Summer Fjordside at the cabin, and is both Norwegian (as of December 2015) and US Citizen (1940).

In 2024, he is 83. He is 'commercially retired', avoids travel, but quite active in spreading his ideas, mentoring disciples, learning what is going on.

Not very impressed with the level of methods for IT/Agile gang. They are nowhere near seriously doing software and systems engineering. Far too many top managers and professors who still cannot quantify critical values and qualities. Responsibility and motivation for serious success and quality seems totally lacking. Sad, the 'war against ourselves'.