Herding Cats

Retrospective Coherence - What Does That Mean?

Why is the past easier to predict than the future? Retrospective Coherence is looking back in time and creating a coherent narrative around what happened. The accuracy of this narrative is suspect because the narrative can only be b...

Systems Engineering Principles

A critically missing process in many IT projects, especially Agile development projects, are the principles of Systems Engineering. Where I work many times, Systems Engineering dominates the program. Space Flight, Embedded Systems, Softw...

Rechtin Dies

Eberhardt Rechtin died today. Rechtin was a Director DARPA, helped create the Goldstone Deep Space Network, was the Chief Engineer of HP, the CEO of Aerospace Corporation, and Assistant Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His book...

Engineering Complex Systems

Complex Systems abound. How to engineer them is a challenging problem in any domain. In our Software Intensive System of Systems domain to complexities include all the moving parts and the people that interact with those moving parts. H...

Complex, Complexity, Complicated (Update)

The popular notion that Cynefin can be applied in the software development domain as a way of discussing the problems involved in writing software for money is missing the profession of Systems Engineering. From Wikipedia Cynefin is... ...

Product, Project, or Process ...ilities and the Systems Engineering Paradigm

During a twitter today, there was a question about what are the drivers of project success. This is the picture I provided The question was where is the Quality as a driver. Here's the answer to that Related articles Architectur...

The Profession of Risk Management and it's Value to Project Success

I've had an engagement on social media recently, where it was blatantly clear there is a low level of understanding of how managing in the presence of uncertainty is sorely missing in the agile development community, where the focus is o...

DDSTOP The Saga Continues

There's been a rash of conjectures about all kinds of bad business, project, and software development (agile and traditional) management ideas of late. Time to update the Don't Do Stupid Things on Purpose (DDSTOP) post. “There’s nothi...

Software Intensive System of Systems

The domain I work in is categorized as Software Intensive System of Systems (SISoS). In this domain, we applied traditional program and project management methods for cost and schedule management at the top level. This means a Capabiliti...

A Compendium of Root Cause Analysis Resources

When mistakes occur, blame the process, not people. Root Cause Analysis is the means to fix the cause, rather than treat the symptom. • What allowed the mistake to happen?• What will prevent mistakes from occurring in the future?• Assu...