Herding Cats

Thinking like a Systems Engineer

The paradigm of systems engineering and agile development is starting to come together. "Some Future Trends and Implications for Systems and Software Engineering Processes," Barry Boehm, Systems Engineering, Volume 9, Number 1, 2006 presents and overview of how software intensive... Read more →

Value Centered Management

The agile community describes a "value focused" approach to management and development activities. While few would argue that the creation of value is not useful in managing projects, the question is what are the characteristics of these values? A Systems... Read more →

What are plans good for?

David Schmaltz provides us with a essay on the in-deterministic nature of "transcription." It's a great overview of the issues associated with music interpretation, composition, and performance. I'm familiar enough with the classical music to understand that the interpretation of... Read more →

Stats

Frank Patrick pointed out an economic statistics site that has many interesting numbers. One stat that directly impacts our work is the cost of living for the workforce and this cost's impact on recruiting. These and other costs have direct... Read more →

Iron Triangles and Spiders

Last March I posted a piece on the "Iron Triangle" of project management. It deserves a repeat in light of a discussion on resource management that has started on a forum. The Iron Triangle is a traditional (although flawed) way... Read more →

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 The Art of... Read more →

The Role of Systems Engineering

Effective Systems Engineering enables the project team to sense, anticipate, and prepare for continuing change in an orderly manner. This sounds a lot like "agile" to me. Brad Appleton provides a nice overview of Feature Driven Development that could be... Read more →

Agile Spacecraft Development

SpaceDev provides mission management capabilities of small payloads to orbit. "Responsive" is a term they use in their print ad. Maybe "responsive" is a core attribute of agile projects and agile project management that better describes the behavior of the... Read more →

The Agile Debate

Jack pointed me to a posting about Extreme Programming and agile. For me the debate is long over - there are good and bad things about XP and the agile paradigm. Most of the bad things come from inexperience on... Read more →

Best Evidentuary Materials

I think well of all skepticism to which I reply: "Let's try it." – Friedrich Nietzsche When a suggestion is made that there is a solution to a long standing problem - such as productivity improvement or performance enhancement -... Read more →

2006 NASA PM Challange

The 2006 NASA PM Challenge is a conference on the PM processes for complex projects. Update... Here's another site from within the PM Challenge Center for Program/Project Management Research (CPMR). Nancy Leveson is a contributor to this site. She was... Read more →

Riding Fast

A recent Blogger described a ride to work on a mountain bike at 30MPH. As a moderately experienced cyclists (road not mountain) it got me thinking. Our weekend training rides in our club peloton of 10 to 15 provides a... Read more →

What is the Difference Between a Project Manager and a Project Leader?

From Kouzes & Posner, The Leadership Challenge, presented in NASA Project Management Challenge 2006, NASA Project Managers: Having the "Right Stuff," Dr. Jerry Mulenburg, NASA Ames Research Center Managers Manage Provide the vision Maintain the status quo Assist others to... Read more →

Leadership

A recent series of postings on an agile software development forum asked "what are the attributes of a leader?" Many answers were from what I would call the "soft side" of modern management. Attributes that you would want a good... Read more →

Alternative PM Paradigms

What is the baseline project management paradigm? This is a question that has been asked several times lately. The reason it is of interest is not because of the content of any specific project management method, but because there is... Read more →

Seth Sees Queues

Seth Godin's sees queues everywhere he goes. Concessions at the airport, order taking on the phone are his examples. Having just returned from LA, my experience with a rental car agency, Star Bucks (twice daily), the US Border crossing in... Read more →