Herding Cats

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...

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

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

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...

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...

The Practitioner's Handbook of Project Performance

Our two chapters in The Practioner's Handbook of Project Performance: Agile, Waterfall and Beyond, edited by Mark Phillip's Routledge, 2019 is now out. Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 are principles and practices of risk management contributed...

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...

A Compendium of Risk Management Resources

Risk Management is essential for development and production programs. Information about key project cost, (technical) performance, and schedule attributes is often uncertain or unknown until late in the program.Risk issues that can be ...

Quote of the Day - Plucked by Puffery

To the layperson, puffery seems like a license to lie, which, frankly, isn’t totally wrong. A well-known book on torts by William Prosser and W. Page Keeton stated it this way: “The puffing rule amounts to a seller’s privilege to lie h...

Quote of the Day

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we must do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at c...