Herding Cats

A Compendium of Blog Posts on Project Management

Project management is a collection of techniques for proposing, planning, implementing, managing, and evaluating projects, combined with the management of the people executing the project. It is the application of knowledge, skills, to...

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...

Return of the Swamp Monster (Standish Report)

Some #Noestimates advocates are heard quoting the Standish Report, reporting the non-data date that 60% of IT projects fail and of course that NOT ESTIMATING would have somehow, by some means, through some magical force has saved these p...

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 ...

Statistics, Bad Statistics, and Damn Lies

It is popular to use the quote Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics to counter some statement about a probabilistic behaviour. The origin of this phrase remains unknown, but it is popularly attributed to Sir Charles Dilke. Another likely ...

Standish Numbers

I'm not a fan of the approach taken by Standish to report success rates in IT for many reasons, not the least of which the lack of transparency for the source data, the statistical processing methods, and the population statistics. But ...

Bridge Building and Software Development

There are vocal proponents that software development is unlike any other engineering process. This may be true, but for different reasons. I was reading a PhD Thesis from Robert Powell at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Powell's...

Questions That Need Answers

The second day of the PMI Earned Value Management World 2009 conference produced some thoughts. There were many presentations, some good, some better. But during one presentation it came to me that all the "whining" about how poorly proj...