Herding Cats

Improving Projects With Pithy Comments

Pithy comments seem to be the norm on some forums and blogs around improving the probability of success for a project or program. "Buy my software and your dream of project success will come true." "Buy my book or better... Read more →

Agile in the US Department of Defense

The 2010 National Defense Acquisition Act, Section 804 requires Department of Defense IT implement processes that include: early and continual involvement of the user; multiple, rapidly executed increments or releases of capability; successive prototyping to support an evolutionary approach; and... Read more →

Alert - Joint Strike Looses $11.5B

Daily or semi-daily blogging is some times not enough. I'm going to try out the notion of an ALERT. When the term "complex project" is mentioned here's an example. Joint Strike Fighter. The $380B (yes that is a Billion) program... Read more →

Quote of the Day

John Goodpasture had this on his Blog. "It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of... Read more →

Are You Doing Project Management?

Long ago I had a Blog conversation with an expert in MSFT Project Server about cost management in projects. His position was managing the details of cost with a resource loaded schedule was a waste of time. I was embedded... Read more →

Wild Swans not Black Swans

I was riding the DC Metro back from our new office to the hotel downtown, when I saw a rider reading a book "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China," Jung Chan. It dawned on me this was the true paradigm... Read more →

Quote of the Day - Leadership

When people speak of leadership, agility, mission, vision - they are many time not speaking from experience or past performance. But instead speak as an adviser to those attempting to lead. The exceptions exist of course - Jack Welch, Larry... Read more →

Quote of the Day

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. - W. Edward Deming The notion here is that everything is process. Process is King. People over process is pretty much nonsense as... Read more →

Risk Management Source

There are several risk management resources that are needed to connect the dots between Cost, Schedule, Technical Performance and Risk adjustments to each of these. One of the best starting points is at the Mitre Systems Engineering Practice Office. This... Read more →

SV=1.0 and You're Late?! Not if you're paying attention

There have been suggestions that SV is not a good indicator of performance. That Schedule Variance Can Equal 0 and We Can Be A Year Late! This suggestion was made on EV Linked In. I also found a similar suggestion... Read more →

A Project Managers Formula for Success

John Wooden had a pyramid for successful basketball teams. That same pyramid works for successful project managers. This does not necessarily mean a successful project. Each of these items builds on each other or supports each other. If we look... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Good writing is not written; it's rewritten! Thanks to John Goodpasture for providing this quote in his post about Red Teams. It triggered all the proposal development brain cells from past engagement. There are "color team" reviews during proposal development.... Read more →

Basis of Succcesful Project Controls

A successful approach to project controls system needs to define the processes for: Thorough planning; Timely baseline establishment and control; Information broken down by product as well as by organization or function; Objective measures of progress and performance against the... Read more →

Why Some Agilist Think One Size Fits All

I the mistake of commenting on a Lean Development Group post about the differences between Heathrow's Terminal 5 and Beijing's Capital Airport Terminal. I suggested that capital construction projects in totalitarian societies, remember the country is name People Republic of... Read more →

Connecting Risk and the WBS

When risk management is mentioned as an activity in project management, it is not always placed in a proper context, or any context for that matter. Here's a suggested way to "connect the dots" between risk and core element of... Read more →

Agile Analogies

I'm not a big basketball fan. I don't know that much about the game. I was a volleyball player in college and as a young adult (30's). At breakfast today (Sunday), while working a DoD program for the past 4... Read more →

Microsoft Project Has Stopped Working

Want to know why Microsoft Project is both loved and loathed in our business - aerospace and defense? Under heavy load, hours of working with large files, and lots of opens, closes, usage of all the fields, all the narratives... Read more →

Earned Value Management Training

There are many sources of Earned Value Management training. Some good, some not so good. Here is the training materials from Department of Energy, that is one of the better resources. Module 1: Introduction to Earned Value Management Module 2:... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The task of estimating costs, planning and scheduling men and materials and then controlling these resources to maximize production output, while minimizing costs, can be a very difficult job. These efforts become more complex with the increase in the size... Read more →

Failure of Projects

There is lots of discussion of the number of projects that fail. Standish has their "infamous" report with all it's faulty statistics. But there is a better set of data in a broader domain. "The core problem of project failure,"... Read more →