Herding Cats

A Source of Complex Adaptive Systems

One of the legacies of Isaac Newton was a vision of the world operating with "clockwork" precision, set in motion at the creation and running in the prescribed groove defined by the creator. It was an image of a deterministic... Read more →

Finally, A Challange to the Standish Report

The Standish Report is the basis and many discussions how why software projects fail and of course the proposed new methods needed to prevent these failures. Robert Glass' IEEE Computer column in the May/June 2005 issues asks many of the... Read more →

The Not So New Paradigm of Delivering Value

It has been suggested that delivering value is a critical success factor for software projects. It is unlikely anyone in their right mind would disagree with that premise. The next suggestion is that delivering value is part of a new... Read more →

Myths in Project Managemet

I finished a book on a recent business trip. When They Separated Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Barber, Princeton University Press, 2004. The book defines four major categories of myth: Silence - what everyone is expected... Read more →

Invisible Means Difficult to Measure

Software doesn't have visible artifacts in the same way a highway construction or an environmental cleanup project does. The tangible evidence of progress in a software project can be visible through a user interface or a report, but the mechanisms... Read more →