Herding Cats

Level of Effort Tasks Inside of Discrete Work

One issue with including Level of Effort activities inside a project withe near 100% discrete work is how to adjust the duration of this LOE work as the discrete work changes duration. Typically an LOE tasks would be Project Management... Read more →

Why Understanding the Principles is Essential for Project Success

The principles of project management have remained unchanged since the begining of time - in spite of some claims that the theory of project management is obsolete. Describe the product or service to be delivered in some form meaningful to... Read more →

Confidence Intervals

I had a few conversations over the past weeks about "cause and effect" processes. "If you do this (X), then this will result (Y)." "X causes Y," "X and Y are related in some way," "when X appears, we should... Read more →

Thinking Logically About Systems Problems

I've been having a conversation of sorts regarding systems and systems issues. A starting point is John Gall's book The Systems Bible: The Beginners Guide to Systems Large and Small, 3rd Edition. This book is interesting if only for the... Read more →

Systems

There is some discussion about systems, how systems work or don't work, and possible fixes for broken system going around the discussion boards and some Blogs. Before anyone starts proferring opinions about systems, they need to read - several times... Read more →

Word Map

Frank Patrick showed this tool on his Blog. Here's my "word map" from recent posts. Read more →

Navigating the Project's Territory

All the clichés say "the map is not the territory," or "the menu is not the meal," or "there is no such thing as the critical path," or "PERT is meaningless." But they are just clichés. They add no value,... Read more →

The WBS is our Friend

A colleague came to my office yesterday with a request to show her the tool we use to produce formal Work Breakdown Structures. In our defense business area this a call "wib isss." Anyway, she wanted to make sure that... Read more →

Scheduling Health

When we speak about "Project Management," and consider that "managing" the project means manging the deliverables and the schedule for these deliverables. Because of course all the self-actualization and "softer" side of project management is completely irrelevant if you're late... Read more →

Waterfall as a bad idea?

In a past life, the development of hardware and the associated software was done in small incremental cycles. Mary Poppendieck's YouTube talk has some interesting comments about the history of leadership in software development. In this past life we built... Read more →