Herding Cats

Managing Multiple Projects is Called Program Management

Some recent posting speak about the difficulties of managing multiple projects at the same time. And how this is not a very good idea. How confusion results and how it turns into a bigger problem. This of course is not... Read more →

Doing Risk Management Right

Many organizations give lip service to managing technical and programmatic risk. They say they are doing risk management, but of course they are not. This is more common than you might think, even for large enterprise projects. Managing risk as... Read more →

Reasons to Avoid Risk Management

The DACS Gold Practice (tm) Practice Series, Formal Risk Management speaks to the reasons risk management is more difficult than it appears. We have no cost/schedule risk because new technology will increase our productivity by 5-to-10 times. We are using... Read more →

21 Suggestions for Success

Our daughter is starting her freshman year at our local university. I received this in the mail from a parent with kids graduated and gone. 21 Suggestions for Success - H. Jackson Brown, Jr. Marry the right person. This one... Read more →

A New Agile PM Book?

I came across The Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility, Michele Slinger and Stacia Broderick. The title alone caught my eye, always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to management projects in the presence of change. There was... Read more →

Over v. Balancing Opposing Objectives

The Agile Manifesto uses the term "Over." While in the Agile leadership community have suggested this approach is a guide for the conversation between the customer and the developers, others see it as a strict boundary. We here in the... Read more →

0% or 100% Done

Johanna Rothman's Blog had a link to KnowledgeCraft's article on Half Actions. This notion is part of David Allen's Getting Things Done. These concepts are connected in the execution of a project through an Integrated Master Plan and its Integrated... Read more →

Stay True to Your Process

Continuing to read The Handbook of Program Management, Dr. James T. Brown, McGraw Hill. Came across a concept that ties all the process discussion together. Brown suggests to avoid spending money on consultants and assessment (although both he and we... Read more →

It Is All About Context

Any discussion of process improvement, process method, or methodology needs to have a context and a business domain. The tendency to generalize about process and method is common in the agile as well as conventional discussions. When I say "Process... Read more →

Responding to Change Versus Following a Plan

Another agile manifesto statement is "responding to change over following a plan." What is critically important here is to understand that any credible plan is subject to change. It has to change. If the plan doesn't change in the presence... Read more →

People Over Process?

The very notion that one thing "trumps" another in the management of projects is troubling at best and mis-guided at worse. Mis-guided because the statement has no context, no business domain, no boundary for assessing the applicability. Let's consider two... Read more →

NASA Photo Archive

NASA late last month launched an interactive Web site that 21 of the agencies stored and managed images. The final collection process is still developing but here's the access path: http://www.nasaimages.org/index.html Read more →

Who’s Money Is It Anyway?

When I mentioned that all decision processes in IT eventually come down to money, it raised the hackles of one of the "thought leaders" of the agile software development community. Nothing new here. It's a common occurrence – hackle rising... Read more →

What Does Done Look Like?

We use the term "done" all the time. It's built into the notion of the Integrated Master Plan / Integrated Master Schedule. Through Jurgen Appelo's site I found CM Crossroads has a nice definition of DONE. The 10 Principles of... Read more →

The Handbook of Program Management

There are very few project or program management books that interest me from the popular press. I read loads of DoD guides, technical books (Performance Based Earned Value, Paul Solomon), and really technical books (Effective Risk Management: Some Keys to... Read more →