Herding Cats

Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning

Brad Egland has a post about the Four Stages of Team Development. This concept was first developed in 1965 by Bruce Tuckman and later updated by Bruce to five stages with the adjourning step. Brad's reference book Fundamentals of Project... Read more →

The Failure of Invariance

When there is a discussion around PERT, the Central Limit Theorem, estimating durations, efforts, and costs, or any probabilistic or statistical aspect of a project, there is usually a fundamental flaw in the thought process. When we estimate, we are... Read more →

Volatility Fails as a Proxy for Risk

"volatility per se, be it related to weather, timing of the morning newspaper, is simply a benign statistical probability factor that tells us nothing about risk until it is coupled with a consequence," - Robert H. Jeffrey, "A New Paradigm... Read more →

Management in a Post Industrial Age

There are unlimited opinions floating around about the role of management. Many come from voices that would have management be removed from the process - the extreme agile point of view. For those looking to understand how management has and... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Knowing where you are most likely to fail can help set the stage for reducing the chances of failure. - Bilal M. Ayyub, Peter G. Prassinos, and John Etherton Read more →

PMI Virtual Communities

PMI has moved to Virtual Communities, away for the standalone organizations of the past. What ever their reasoning, it doesn't matter. I voted against the VC move for College of Performance Management, but we went there anyway. Now that VC's... Read more →

Fort Worth PMI Chapter and Symposium

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Fort Worth Texas PMI Chapter meeting and two sessions of the PMI Symposium this June. Here's the material Fort Worth Chapter Meeting PMI chapter meeting (v4) Symposium: Immutable Principles of Project Management... Read more →

Making Trades in the Iron Triangle is a Ponzi Scheme

Ben Snyder has several posts on PM Hut about the demise of the "Iron Triangle" in PMBOK® Version. For some reason PMI decided to remove this concept, just when those of us in the defense and space business are starting... Read more →

Quote of the Day

There are no points for predicting rain, only building lifeboats -Warren Buffet’s Noah Principle When we hear about the "principles" of project management, good principles for sure, we need to ask the next question how can we cause actionable outcomes Read more →

What Does a Credible Schedule Look Like?

When someone tells me they have a schedule, they have a budget, they've got a set of requirements. One starting response is: Are these schedules, budgets, and requirements credible? What are the units of measure of credible? How would we... Read more →

Cost Estimating

The discussion of estimating - cost and schedule - has produced references usable in a variety of domains. As a background here's the guidance in the domain I work. This "mandates" an Estimate At Completion with a Best Case, Worst... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Eisenhower had to deal with as "fractious and dysfunctional a group of egomaniacs as any war had ever seen." Ike's greatest achievement was keeping the allied command focused on killing the Nazi's not each other. - From a speech delivered... Read more →

The Psychology of Risk

Mike Clayton pointed me to a post on the The Psychology of Risk. The book in his post Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, looks like the next reading assignment after our book club finishes Against The Gods. Mike's... Read more →

Agile and the Jazz Methphor

I was surfing some presentations looking for good layout ideas, when I came across a Jazz - A Metaphor for Agile Management. I'm not a real jazz fan, but I do enjoy certain artist. Sitting in the Chautauqua, performance hall... Read more →

Sources of Estimating Errors

Starting with Tversky & Kahnemann (1974), "Judgment under Uncertainty: heuristics and Biases," there are sources of error that should lay the foundation for abandoning the simple and many times naive 3 point estimate approach to work duration and effort. Representativeness... Read more →

Let's End "Old School" Estimating

The standard approach to project taskl duration estimating is the PMBOK® 3 point estimate. Josh has provided several approaches to the discussion of the issues.The top two issues are: The anchoring and adjusting error occur when humans make estimates in... Read more →

Quote of the Day

He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives - Col John Boyd USAF (Ret) Boyd is the author of the Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action loop. The OODA loop is a model for decision making that combines theoretical constructs... Read more →

Five Immutable Principles of Project Managment

I'm headed to Fort Worth to speak at the PMI Chapter meeting and conduct a workshop. The topics start with the Immutable Principles of Project Management. Many authors have their lists of principles and practices. Here's what has emerged over... Read more →

Lijit casues problems in IE 8

I removed the Lijit search engine for now. It causes IE8 to show a blank and throw a Java script error. Thank you Microsoft. Chrome and FireFox work fine of course. Read more →

Anchoring and Adjustment in Estimating

Josh from PMStudent.com has a post about estimating. There is a discussion of using 3 point estimates. Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that making 3 point estimates is a bad idea. Instead use confidence intervals for risk... Read more →