Herding Cats

To sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there's the rub - Probability Distributions and Statistical Independence

The common mistake of using a "normal" distributions for all kinds of things - usually misuse. Here's the core problem. For any modeling to work in any tractable way, the individual probability distributions - say for duration or cost -... Read more →

Book Report

I've purchased two "agile" books with "agile" in their title. I decided the review these two books in a previous post. I've had an interaction with both authors over the past years. Jurgen Appelo and John Goodpastuer each have a... Read more →

The Best Management Movie - Ever

I took home an iPad from the office to take a training course. It is the Michael Hammer process management course. While "studying" for the course, I visited by NetFlix account to see how it worked on the iPad. Very... Read more →

The Performance Measurement Baseline

Brad Egland has a nice post about the Work Breakdown Structure. The guidance for the WBS is being updated. MIL-STD-881C is coming this summer. 881C like 881B describes the WBS as: A product-oriented family tree composed of hardware, software, services,... Read more →

Competency Based Project Managers

There is a vocal discussion about competency based assessment of Project Managers. The discussion goes like this... The Project Management Institute's Project Management Professional (PMP) is being diluted and the ASAPM approach is better. Forgetting for the moment the commercial... Read more →

Bayesian Methods Applied to Technical Performance Measures

The current edition of the Defense Acquisition Research Journal has an article, "A Statistical Approach to the Development of Progress Plans Utilizing Bayesian Methods." The importance of this paper is several fold: It defines in detail the development of Technical... Read more →

Use and Misuse of the Normal Distribution

There have been several posts recently about the use of the Normal Distribution for project management, risk, and related topics. I first came across this issue with Mike Cohn's Agile Estimating and Planning. My review pointed out the misuse of... Read more →

Alert - Jobs?

If the economy adds about 208,000 jobs per month, which was the average monthly rate for the best year of job creation in the 2000s, then it will take until June 2023 — another 12 years — to close the... Read more →

One of the Nonsense Quotes

Business wants estimates in order to manage financial risk. Agile makes this unnecessary – we only have to fund one iteration (at a time). Really? And business will be happy with the results of only one iteration's worth of work,... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The winning general is the one who can best act on imperfect information and half formed theories. — Napoleon Bonaparte The notion that SUCCESSFUL "traditional project management" is Big Design Up Front, Unchangeable Requirements, Waterfall development, is just that —... Read more →

The Tale of Two Agile Books

I have two "Agile Management" books on my desk. . While these books have similar titles they have distinctly different approaches to the topic. I'm reading both in parallel and writing notes and comments for both in parallel. I'll write... Read more →

Quote of the Day

“The difference between a vision and an hallucination is the number of people that see it.” – T. Paulson Read more →