Herding Cats

Connecting Agile Teams with the Business Strategy

Agile development and business value must be connected through a governance process Read more →

Impediments to Successful Earned Value Management

There is so much blather about Earned Value, I've run out of energy trying to provide corrections and switched to have other people do my work for me. Here's a nice paper that surveys many of the reasons EV fails... Read more →

Software Engineering is Dead?

Tom DeMarco has an opinion piece in IEEE Software titled, Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone? He conjectures that 40 years after the NATO Conference on Software Engineering where software engineering was first proposed, DeMarco wonders... Read more →

Subtle Language

Lynda Bourne has an informative post on the connections between project and program management and change management. In this post there are some words that trigger a response from my experience in IT and government program management Output versus Outcome... Read more →

Milestones are Rocks on the Side of the Road

Craig Brown (one of my favorite Blogs) posted a piece about the use of Milestones. Actually it was a comment from Eugenio regarding measuring small increments. Here in the defense world we work very hard to NOT have milestones in... Read more →

Are You Doing Project Management?

There is a continuous discussion about agile and project management. Some voices in the agile community claim "we don't have project managers on our scrum projects, we don't need them." Instead of engaging in the conversation about the need or... Read more →

Semper Fi Mac

In the beginning was the word, and the word was God. In the beginning was God, and all else was darkness and void, and without form. So God created the heavens and the Earth. He created the sun, and the... Read more →

System Dynamics (SD) and Design Structure Matrix (DSM)

There is a very clever theory that was developed at MIT and put to use by Lockheed Martin and similar firms. This is the Design Structure Matrix concept. The other concept is System Dynamics. System dynamics is an approach to... Read more →

Work Packages are our Friends

Almost every project Schedule I've seen in the commercial and sometimes in defense are horizontal "shop floor" schedules. This means work flows from left to right, progress is measured by the percent complete bar getting blacker, and the task bars... Read more →

Describing What "Done" Looks Like

A powerful concept in the management of US Defense and NASA programs is the concept of a maturity assessment review. This is usually missing from commercial IT projects. I've seen it in large construction programs at sophisticated firms. In most... Read more →

The Century Session as Started

I do have a life outside of Program Planning and Controls! Here in Colorado cycling is a very popular summer sport. The Garmin/Slipstream Tour de France team is based in Boulder. In the winter of course skiing and boarding takes... Read more →

Over Target Baseline / Over Target Schedule

There is a condition in the DoD contracting business called OTB (Over Target Baseline) and its partner OTS (Over Target Schedule). This is the condition program managers want to avoid like the plague. It is a condition almost every commercial... Read more →

The 3 Elements of Project Management

There are three core components of Project Management. Well at least there are three "simple" components: People Processes Technology This is a naive view, but useful one for the purposes of this post. There are many voices in the project... Read more →

Managing in the Presence of Change

Managing in the presence of change is a core competency of any project manager. The complete myth that traditional project management - read PMBOK - tries to control change, to prevent change, or to avoid change all together is nonsense.... Read more →

Sources of Program Failure

In large, complex programs program planning and controls comes into play in way not found in small self-contained projects. The large programs include Enterprise IT, usually ERP or similar projects. Large construction projects, with subcontractors. Aerospace and Defense programs of... Read more →

Books

A recent post on Andrew Filev's blog - a great blog BTW - answered the question about Project Management Books. Here's a collection of book recommendations going back to 2005 2005 books on or about project management Books needed for... Read more →

The ABC's and Actionable Outcomes

At PM Hut there is a post about the ABC's of project management. This article has useful suggestions, but does not state the actions needed to produce the benefits. The ABC's are Anticipate Build a Good Team Communicate So here's... Read more →

Fidelity of Earned Value Planning

There is a concept that detailed planning is part of Earned Value Management. Some have described projects with 100's of thousands of tasks - 200,000 in one example. This of course is a fundamentally wrong approach to developing the Performance... Read more →

Software Complexity and Program Management

There is a nearly infinite number of software development domains. One domain where there is a variety of applications, ranging from embedded real time control systems, to simple database applications for holding temporary date is "flight software" for spacecraft. There... Read more →

Baseline Magazine IT Project Survey and Requirements

I'm never a fan of "project surveys" for all the right statistical analysis reasons. But Baseline Magazine has a nice presentation that goes along with a survey from a consulting company. The Truths About Project Planning is worth a look.... Read more →