Herding Cats

Attributes of Successful Projects

There has been some discussion of late about agile project management and its relationship (or not) to tradition project management. Some have mentioned PMBOK as the way to "NOT" manager projects, others have even mentioned that agile projects may not... Read more →

The Myth of Big Design Up Front

Every time I hear someone state the evils of Big Design Up Front I cringe. Mockup Provides Early Glimpse of new Space Exploration Vehicle is but one of 100's of examples of how agile, adaptive projects deals with emerging requirements.... Read more →

At What Graunularity Should We Estimate?

This month's Sky and Telescope's "Mission Update" column describes the Vision for Space Exploration project components, one of which is Crew Exploration Vehicle. The total estimated cost of the Crew, Cargo and Launch vehicle comes in around $104B of 13... Read more →

Custom Fitting

Today I experienced "custom fitting" as a trend here to stay. Our son was at the Boot Fitter, I went to a cycle frame fitting session. One question would be - how can we "fit" project management processes to the... Read more →

Using Estimates as a Management Tool

For some reason I've been hooked by David Anderson's conjectures about estimating. This has developed over time, mainly because my role on the current project is to aide in the production of a "credible" Integrated Master Schedule (IMS), where estimates... Read more →

Doing Science

David Anderson writes some stimulating words, but troubling ones as well... What does it mean - "Management science for software engineering"? Why do I say that on this site? I'm not making it up. What are we saying when we... Read more →

Planning is NOT Muda

In David Anderson's self proclaimed "bad boy of project management" post on estimating he states that "we should stop estimating and start planning based on capacity." This is a twist on words to make it look like he's objecting to... Read more →

CMMI and Agile

I've had some inquiries for two papers on using agile processes inside a CMMI framework. It was not clear for the requesters what the problem was they were trying to address, but it is important to restate several things about... Read more →

IT Work Management

David Anderson recently posted an interesting paper on how Theory of Constraints can be used to improve an IT department at Microsoft. What struck me was the amount of time used to do estimates. David states that 40% of the... Read more →

More Thoughts on Watefall

I'm not a fan of Waterfall approaches at all. We have a nice post hanging all on the wall (we really like posters hanging on the walls) Don't do stupid things on purpose Waterfall is one of those. But the... Read more →

Waterfall and Agile

Ron Jeffries has a post A Metric Leading to Agility is which he claims that agile's role is to shoot waterfall in the back. Who in their right mind does waterfall? It seems only the software development community missed the... Read more →

What is Value?

The agile project management community talks about increasing value. But what is value and how is it increased? They don't really say - just that agile processes address the value discussion. Here's a paper that discusses some of the issues... Read more →

What is the Purpose of a Schedule?

Why do we make schedules? This seems like an obvious question. We make them because we're project managers or planners and that's what project managers or planners do - they make schedules of the work to be done on the... Read more →

DI-MGMT-81650

The Data Item Description 81650 approved in March of this year and made effective in July describes how to build an Integrated Master Schedule (IMS) for use in government procurements. There is an interesting phrase... The IMS shall be used... Read more →

Big Design Up Front?

There is a myth in the agile community that the Big Design Up Front (BDUF) style project is what takes place in high ceromony firms. I received a copy of The Space Shuttle Decision: 1965 - 1972: History of the... Read more →

Common Sense Project Management

There is lots of verbiage flying around about what is a "good project management process?" Is it agile? Is it structured? Stage gates? Incremental? Spiral? Massively parallel? Theory of Consttaints? Toyota's latest super secret process? When the term "agile project... Read more →

Why do we make project management so hard?

There have been several discussions on the forums and in a Blog or two about how formal project management processes have failed us in the past. We have a saying where I work... Don't do stupid things on purpose Here... Read more →

Leading

Managing or leading entails the responsibility to have a justification for what you're doing and to be able to articulate that justification in a way that nine times out of ten is not going to be second-guessed. — Al Diaz,... Read more →