Herding Cats

Cynics v. Skeptics in Project Management

Much is being written lately about the failures of conventional project management processes. It seems there is a difference thought between the skeptics about these processes (for all the right reasons) and the cynics about these processes (for many of... Read more →

Simple Conditions for Project Success

From the recent NASA Project Management Challenge are four conditions for project success: You can't succeed if you can't manage the work, people, customer, and the environment You can't manage these project elements if you can't measure their current state,... Read more →

Three Simple Questions

From a government program management review meeting this week, I came away with three simple questions that must be answered by any project management process. Anyone claiming to be a project manager, program manager, or anyone conjecturing that their new,... Read more →

Thermostatic Control

There is a popular misunderstanding that the thermostatic control paradigm is how projects are managed in the real world. This starts with the misunderstanding of how "Program Planning and Controls" are applied on projects and how the notion of control... Read more →

The BIG Question for any project management process

There is one and only one question that needs to be asked when ever any speaks about a pr oject management approach. Whether this approach is full DoD IMP/IMS down to someone claiming to have "magic beans." The method must... Read more →

PMI Scheduling Professional

At the PMI College of Scheduling conference, May 4th - May 8th in Chicago, a Scheduling Professional Credential is being introduced. The conference speakers address the issues around project planning and controls, scheduling, programmatic risk, performance measurement baselines, and integrated... Read more →

Sacred Cow: Teams

The comments from the "Killing the sacred cows of project management" post brought some heat (not much light yet) to bear on the approach of "knocking out" thoughts in a blog. Teams So here's the first topic a bit more... Read more →

The Best PM Book I've Read So Far

I read lots and lots of project management books. Ranging from useful to nonsense. This one's both useful and makes sense. Reinventing Project Management: The Diamond Approach to Successful Growth and Innovation, Aaron J. Shenhar and Dov Dvir, Harvard Business... Read more →

Killing the Sacred Cows of Project Management

There are many sacred cows in project management. Not just the conventional approaches to project management, but also agile, lean, feral, radical, and extreme project management. Here's my starting list, with a brief intro. More words later: Teams are Everything... Read more →

What I Learned this week from conferences

It's the conference season again. I spoke at the PMI Denver Symposium (Programmatic Risk Management in 5 Easy Pieces), went to 3 days of the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, I'm speaking next week at the Lean conference here in... Read more →

The Profession of Project Management

<> I attended two conferences last week, speaking at one. The 24th Annual Space Symposium and the Denver PMI Symposium. What dawned on me was the level of professionalism at each conference. The... Read more →

Lean and Traditional Project Management

Anyone looking for working examples of how Lean is being deployed within what would appear to be very traditional project management management environments shoudl look at the MIT Lean Advancement Initiative. This was formerly named the Lean Aircraft Initiative, but... Read more →

Confusing Effort with Results - The Curse of Poor Project Management

A Maintenance Officer in 1970, just north of Da-nang was asked me "when is this aircraft going to fly?" Some weak answer came back about who hard everyone was working to get the aircraft fixed and back on flight status.... Read more →

Managing in the Presence of Uncertainty

When the critics of Critical Path Method (CPM) speak about the lack of reality in a critical path they are correctly stating the problem. But they are not correct in the solution. When we speak of the “critical path” for... Read more →

Project Tracking

The current issue of CrossTalk has two papers on schedule performance. Those not familiar with CrossTalk, it is a journal for the defense software business. It is an "approved" US Department of Defense publication. This means that DoD has something... Read more →