Herding Cats

Risk Handling

An agile thought leader provided an advanced outline of a paper on integrating risk and real options for an upcoming conference. A comment was made that traditional project management tries to "avoid" risks. Risk management has four options for "handling"... Read more →

Books needed for Program and Project Management (Update)

While working on a government proposal over the holidays - as is typical for the government to put out the RFP and then go on vacation - I came across another book that is needed for the Program Office Library... Read more →

The 5 P's of Managing Projects

Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. This simple phrase describes the core behavior of all project related work. The notion that “emergence” is the driver of the participants in a project requires careful consideration. The technical or business requirements of the... Read more →

A Bold Faced Lie

Watching TV today and saw an ad for the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid compared to the Mini Cooper - S I assume. The ad by GM claimed the Escalade gets better millage than the Mini - 20MPG in town. I don't... Read more →

Self Organized does not mean Self Directed

Esther Derby writes about self organizing teams in StickMinds.com. I too have heard "leading agile consultants" speak about the virtues of self organizing teams. They usually speak in the absence of any context, business domain, and many times in the... Read more →

A Nice Overview of an Agile approach to projects

Mike Cottmeyer gave a webcast on an approach to managing projects with agile techniques. This talk has some good points. But like many of these presentations, the non-agile project examples are "notional" at best. This means they are simple examples,... Read more →

Bad Decisions? Yea, That's the Problem

On the current PMI site there are several Blog's. Greg Balestrero, the PMI President points to a McKinsey Survey on IT and Michael Hatfield speaks about the core problem of failed projects. Michael states So, what is the main causal... Read more →

Test Requirements, Don't Test Code

A recent post from a DO-178B blog made a powerful statement that just struck me a correct. The only effective testing mechanism is testing requirements - not code. In fact, the very idea of testing code without a reference to... Read more →

Risk Management in Five Easy Pieces

Risk management is essential for any significant project. and is useful for any project where an unfavorable outcome is undesirable. Certain information about key project cost, performance, and schedule attributes are often unknown until the project is underway. The emerging... Read more →

Risk Management is How Adults Manage Projects

This title has been posted before. It's good to remind yourself every once in awhile of the phrase. I'm headed to the nations capital during the inauguration to work a program as the Senior Risk Adviser. This position supports the... Read more →

US Auto Industry

Every one's go some kind of comment on the current Auto Industry debacle. Some informed. Some not so. Some simple rants - informed or not. So philosophical. Some just more of the same. OK, here's mine. In my titled role... Read more →

Book Review Time (Again)

I'm review a book The Handbook of Program Management, Dr. James T. Brown. It's a book about Program Management (from the title), but it's really a book about program success criteria. Like some other book reviews, my style is to... Read more →

Probability and Statistics in Project Estimating

Bill Duncan posted a piece on PM Student titled Estimating Effort. It's a multiple part series that addresses some of the issues around estimating cost and schedule in a project context. Multipart pieces are ineffective in the medium of a... Read more →

A Clever PMP Study Guide

Most PMP study guides are boring. I mean real boring. Boring beyond belief. Here's one that isn't Headfirst PMP Read more →

Earned Value for Time and Materials

Earned Value for discrete contracts is obvious. It's use for Time and Materials and IDIQ (Indefinite Duration and Indefinite Quantity) contracts is discourages in the guidance found in the 7 March 2005 Memorandum from the OUSD(P): 5. EVM is discouraged... Read more →

Latest Earned Value Papers

The current Earned Value concepts are described in a set of new papers: Project Duration Forecasting: Comparing Earned Value Management Methods with Earned Schedule, Walter Lipke The Two Mist Useful Earned Value Metrics: The CPI and TCPI, Quentin Fleming and... Read more →

Irreducable Functions of Program Controls

I'm updating a PPT for a briefing next week on what we do when we're doing Program Controls. Here's a short summary: During Program Execution insight is provided into the contractors performance for both technical and programmatic performance. The Performance... Read more →