Herding Cats

The Role of Planning

Hal Macomber writes of the role of planning and the emergence of the future. Hal calls attention to a Tim Russert interview in which Tony Snow states that the plans for Iraq could not have lasted past the first battle.... Read more →

Performance Based Earned Value

Paul Solomon's book Performance-Based Earned Value is now dog eared and making the rounds of our firm. Mr. Solomons site of the same title is http://pb-ev.com/default.aspx. I'm saying this for several reasons: Earned Value is a critical success factor in... Read more →

Agile Project Management

There's a discussion in Mike Dwyer's Agile Leadership forum and a recent post from Project Connections on agile projects and their management. What struck me about these is how the discussion is actually inverted. The project connections article leaves the... Read more →

Open Journals

Came across a useful link in my travels today looking for Earned Value and Earned Schedule papers Directory of Open Access Journals Read more →

Training

I attended a "Product Planning" session this week in SFO for a tool we've used in the past. The tool maker now wants to broaden their base and move into some enterprise class markets. There were a wide variety of... Read more →

What's Wrong With This Picture

I received an email asking me to fill out a survey from PMI. I thought I'd respond just to see what it's all about. The survey asked about the duties of a Project Scheduler and if I performed any of... Read more →

Some Simple Project Management Guidance

Again Hal Macomber is my inspiration here, with his Ten New Rules of Project Management. I'm assembling a collection of Practice Guides for our project managers and came across this simple set of criteria for managing a project - especially... Read more →

Plan V. Schedule

Hal Macomber has a side bar on a recent post, stating, The purpose of planning is getting that work done that should be done Another approach separates planning from scheduling: Planning is the strategy for getting the work down that... Read more →

Responsibility Assignment Matrix

The Project Connections web site has a posting on RAMs. They call them Responsibility Allocation Matrix which is not quite true - given the general consensus of the industry. But hey it's their site, they can call it what they... Read more →