Herding Cats

New Books for Work

Our current work efforts on forecasting Estimate A Completion and connecting the dots between Earned Value Management and Technical Performance Measures and the sources of Measures of Performance an Measures of Effectiveness is proceedin...

Estimates, Forecasts, Projections (Update)

There is a misuse of the terms of statistics and probability in many domains. Politics being one. The #Noestimates advocates are another of the most prolific abusers of these terms. Here are the mathematical definitions. Not Wikipedia de...

Compendium of Debunking #NoEstimating Conjectures and Fallacies

The conjecture that we can make decisions in the presence of uncertainty without estimating the impacts of those decisions is without any principles that can be tested beyond personal anecdotes of I know people who spend other peoples ...

Summary of No Estimates Posts

After a contentious exchange on twitter about a contentious topic of managing complex adaptive systems - the other side of the exchange doesn't actually MANAGE Complex Systems - he just talks about non-actionable outcomes aspect of his t...

Book(s) of the Month

December is always a busy book month in our household. We have one PhD candidate and one Masters Graduate, both the sciences (one in molecular plant biology and the other in the behavior aspects neuroscience). So books are always great g...

First Comes Theory, Then Comes Practice

The book Integrated Project Management and Control: First Comes Theory, Then the Practice, Mario Vanhoucke, arrived while I was on a business trip. Mario has spoken at several Earned Value Management conferences, written two other impo...

Book of the Month

In our current political turmoil, as well as project management and software development turmoil, claims are made - sometimes wild unsubstantiated claims - of how to NOT do something, how some process can fix your problems, without ever ...

Book of the Month

It seems of late there is a campaign in the software development community, especially in the agile community where ignorance is a virtue. Ignorance of the microeconomics of decision making. The ignorance that all project work contains...

Book of the Month

Business, and the projects used to deliver products and services, relies in estimates, plans, projects - and we all know how accurate they tend be. Careers are made, careers are broken based on perceived accuracy in estimating and planni...

Book of the Month

All project work operates in the presence of uncertainty. Uncertainty comes in two forms on projects and product development. Reducible uncertainty (Epistemic) and Irreducible uncertainty (Aleatory). There is a 3rd kind of uncertaint...