Although Pat Byrne and I have gone our separate ways we still do a good deal of collaboration. Pat recently presented our Defence BNA™ case study at the 5th Annual Project Management Australia Conference in Melbourne, Victoria. (We are indebted to Mark Blackburn who has allowed us to put this case-study into the public domain). You can view the presentation at this link , and his commentary on the conference at this link . It is substantially the same as our presentations earlier in the year to the Project Management Institute in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra, and our presentation to the Australian Institute of Management.

Last week I co-presented it with Cheryl Durrant (no relation in case you're wondering) to the Knowledge Management Roundtable in Melbourne. We modified the presentation a little, but it is substantially the same - the differences in the slides being at the start and finish.

Now it is interesting the reactions we get from our audiences. So far it has been mostly positive. The project managers tend to see it as another tool in their armoury, but express concern at the amount of data involved and the people contact involved in collecting data. On the other hand the knowledge managers like the people bit, and love the diagrams, and seem far less concerned with the problems of data collection. Perhaps this is because knowledge managers have more of a people focus, and project managers have more of a process focus?

Next week I will be presenting the same case study to a group of Defence scientists from Australian, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. This time the substance of the presentation will be quite different, because it will have an Operations Research focus.

Operations Research is the application of the methods of science to complex problems arising in the direction and management of large systems of people, machines, materials and money in industry, business, government and defence. Operations Research seeks to develop a scientific model of the system, incorporating measurements of factors such as chance and risk, with which to predict and compare the outcomes of alternative decisions, strategies or controls. BNA™ I think fits this description perfectly, but I wonder what the scientists' reactions will be, and how different it will be from the project managers and knowledge managers. Time will tell - I'll keep you posted.

Regards Graham