Herding Cats

Resources for Good Project Management

Anecdotes abound of examples of Bad Project Management. Sometimes these anecdotes are used to suggest a corrective or preventive action that might actually work. Other times these suggestions are simply bogus. If those making unsubstantiated claims were to read the... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world. — Arthur Schopenhauer What does that mean? Each of us has our limits. For some, the limit is in the seeing, for others,... Read more →

Modeling the Future is the Basis of Project Success

There's a notion going around that ... “I don’t believe you can make a model of a possible future.” This ignores the principles of predictive analytics, and the direct management actions taken to produce outcomes from those analytical models found... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Just because you don't understand it, does mean it isn't so – Lemony Snicket Read more →

Connecting "What" with "How" - and the Failure to Understand the Principles of Systems Engineering and Systems Management

It's been said by an agile voice that ... Progress and value delivery are not the same thing. In the end, of course, value (to someone) is important. And in the standard-for-today structure of programming for money, we divide what... Read more →

Things I Know About, Do, and Manage

If you click on the link to the right, you'll get an HTML interactive chart Things I know about and practice Read more →

The Ontological Fallacy of No Estimates

The introduction to the #NoEstimates paradigm started with This statement is an ontological fallacy. An Ontological Fallacy is a statement of being or existing with an a priori theory about the organization of some paradigm. There is no principle on... Read more →

Quote of the Day

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a... Read more →

Reading List for the Cone of Uncertainty

The Cone of Uncertainty is a useful approach to defining the expected range of uncertainty at specific stages in a project. The primary purpose of software estimation is not to predict a project’s outcome; it is to determine whether a... Read more →

Virtual Program Management Office Summit

I met Hussain Bandukwaia recently and he is providing a Virtual PMO Summit. Here are the details And the one pager for the background Download PMO Virtual Summit - One Pager (Speakers-Promo Partners) Read more →

Why Johnny Can't Estimate? (Update)

I work in a domain where engineered systems are developed for complex software-intensive system of systems. These systems are engineered with a variety of development methods. Ranging from traditional to agile and combinations in between. These systems are developed for... Read more →

Quote of the Day

I am not much given to regret, so I puzzled over this one a while. Should have taken much more statistics in college, I think - Max Levchin, Paypal Co-Founder Probability and statistics is the basis of all decision making... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Never bring the problem-solving stage into the decision-making stage. Otherwise, you surrender yourself to the problem rather than the solution. — Robert Schuller No problem can be solved until we know the root cause of the problem. If you start... Read more →

The Myth of #Noestimates is in the Same Family as the Myth of Unicorns

The unicorn is a magical creature with a fantastically perverted history. The myth of the Unicorn started with the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder. Pliny wasn’t the most credible of writers (this was long before the Columbia School of Journalism).... Read more →

Quote of the Day

No sensible decision can be made without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it might be — Isaac Asimov To make sensible decisions, in the presence of uncertainty - reducible and irreducible... Read more →

Don't Be Fooled

This is a new Category on Herding Cats that comes from my finishing of the book Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, Gary Smith. Of late I've encountered many people on the web... Read more →

Classification of Different Types of Uncertainty

From "Facets of Uncertainty: Epistemic Uncertainty, non-Stationarity, Likelihood, Hypothesis Testing, and Communication," Keith Beven, Hydrological Sciences Journal, Volume 61, No. 9, pp. 1625-1665. Type of uncertainty Description Aleatory Uncertainty with stationary statistical characteristics. May be structured (bias, autocorrelation, long-term persistence)... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Probabilities are nothing but common sense reduced to calculation - Pierre-Simon LaPlace We should be cautious about calculating without thinking. Calculations are the easy part. The thinking is the hard part. The important question is whether the calculations make sense.... Read more →

Five Immutable Principles of Project Success

Project failure starts when we can’t tell what “done” looks like in any meaningful way. Without some agreement on our vision of “done”, we’ll never recognize it when it arrives, except when we’ve run out of time or money or... Read more →

Book of the Month

The standard way of thinking about decisions is backward, says Ralph Keeney: People focus first on identifying alternatives rather than on articulating values. A problem arises and people react, placing the emphasis on mechanics and fixed choices instead of the... Read more →