State Officer, M.D. (SOMD) is a learning course that uses cohort discussion and learning in community to develop skills to evaluate software project health. SOMD gives the learner a tour of software development, project management, and vendor management practices to help learners recognize healthy and unhealthy developments in projects.

The course material is built around the 4 primary indicators of project health, taken from the Health Rubric — outcomes-orientation, state capacity, procurement flexibility, and iterative development.

This site contains lesson materials divided up into courses, along with supplemental learning and reference material. These materials were originally developed to help State Officers evaluate and shepherd their state’s projects, but the materials have value for anyone who would like to gain a good perspective on software project health.