Herding Cats

Populist versus Technical View of Problems

On a Twitter discussions and email exchanges, there is a notion of populist books versus technical books used to address issues and problems encountered in our project management domains. My recent book Performance-Based Project Managem...

Estimating Accuracy Mathematics

In the estimating business, like many things in project management, there is confusion about principles, practices, and processes. And sometimes even outright misinformation. Here's an example used by the #NoEstimates advocates. Starti...

A Compendium of Risk Management Resources

This blog page is dedicated to the resources used to manage the risk encountered in the development and deployment of Software-Intensive Systems of Systems (SISoS) using traditional and agile development methods. Let's start with a crit...

Your Project Needs a Budget and Other Things

There is a notion that all you need for successful project management is a Budget. This is the notion put forth by some in the #NoEstimates community and repeated in a recent Harvard Business Review post of nearly the same title. This ar...

Reference Design Concept

Long ago in graduate school, we had a concept for software development that turns out to have been just like the hardware guys do today - reference design. This was the era of the ACM Algorithm Handbook. The contents of that handbook sta...

Year End Summary

Thanks to my 17,000 readers. It's been a busy year. Working on both the policy and execution side of large progams. Finished the book after 9 months work, coming in Feburary. The year ended with a focus on estimating and risk. The slew ...

Monte Carlo Simulation

There was a tweet yesterday ... In casinos, the betting rules ensure the house wins (Eliminates Risk) over time This, of course, is not true, nor is it how casinos work. Let's start with a brief overview of Monte Carlo Simulation. ...

Decision Making Means Making Inferences

In software development, we almost always encounter situations where a decision must be made when we are uncertain what the outcome might or even the uncertainty in data used to make that decision. Decision making in the presence of...

Decision Making in the Presence of Uncertainty

There's another rash of Twitter posters supporting the conjecture that decisions can be made about how to spend other people's money without estimating the impact and outcome of that decision. This is a core premise of #NoEstimates from ...

The Origins of Scrum and Empirical Closed Loop Control

I came across a couple of interesting tweets over the weekend (Scrum is) more defined rather than empirical process. Agile in name only. scrum, not agile. not as it was prior to scrum. lost art.Scrum is prescriptive and defined rathe...