Herding Cats

The Three Laws of Systems Engineering

A paper by David McClinton titled "The Unwritten Laws of Systems Engineering," has three laws that are applicable to project management Everything interacts with everything else - a project is a "system." All the elements of the project - cost,... Read more →

Why I'm Not a PMP

Raven Young posted a link observing my membership in PMI but no PMP after my name. I am a member of the ACM, IEEE, its Computer Society, American Physical Society and INCOSE. Each of these professional organizations has a technical... Read more →

Mean or Median

Seth Godin points out that 1/2 of every profession is above the mean and 1/2 are below. This is only true if the statistical distribution of metric for the profession is symmetric. Then the Mean = Median. The Median describes... Read more →

Swanson's Rules

Turns out William H. Swanson's book "...Unwritten Rules of Management," was taken from other sources - unacknowledged sources. While this is a problem for sure, there is another issue in our PM domain. Where are the references and bibliography in... Read more →

Pros and Amatuers

The road bike season is now in full swing on the Front Range. Kinetics is our "rite of spring" that actually had a nice day on Saturday. With this comes larger peletons starting to train for the events starting in... Read more →

An Agile Point of View

I came across Scott Sehlhorts' Bog today where he discusses some of the aspects of agile software development and its relationships with requirements management. While some of the material is a bit of a stretch - good for conversation starting... Read more →

Process v. Phase

A recent conversation on New Grange highlights the confusion between "project management processes" and "project phases." This is a continuing conversation and at times appears esoteric enough to ignore. But in fact it is critical to the success of many... Read more →