Herding Cats

Pearl Tree

I've used several approaches to collecting and managing ideas over the years. There were URL browsing capture tools that put links into folders. There is of course each browsers ways of saving links. There is MindJet which can do this... Read more →

Verifying Recommended Practices - You've Got To Show Me the Data

If we're ever going to move away from the anecdotal style books, we're going to need experiments that show the recommended changes actually work. The material to the left, Code of Best Practice: Experimentation is one place to start. In... Read more →

Another View of Agile

Power to the Edge: Command and Control in the Information Age, speaks to the integration of traditional management with complex systems in the presence of agility, emergence, and variability of the real world. This is a book about managing in... Read more →

Tell Me It Isn't True

When there are statements like this, in the absence of a domain and a context of a domain, it just reinforces why I don't recommend you read any populist books on a topic if you have any skills at all... Read more →

What Does Complexity Acheive?

With all the wrangling around simple systems, avoiding complexity, emergent order out of complexity, we need to ask what does complexity achieve. In a paper titled, Complexity and Robustness J. M. Carlson, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara,... Read more →

Complex Adaptive Systems

When I read something like.. Self-organization is the process where a structure or pattern appears in a system without a central authority or external element imposing it through planning. I get a smile on my face. The populist (like that... Read more →

Self Organizing Analogy Only Works when the Domain is Defined

While watching the AFC West playoffs with our beloved Broncos v. New England (they lost bad, were outplayed, and couldn't stop Brady), it dawned on me how defining the domain is critically important to any discussion around a method. This... Read more →

Quote of the Day

There is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects - Jorge Luis Borges ”La flor de Coleridge”, in Otras Inquisiciones 1952. When we seek to... Read more →

Management Improvement - A Project or Operations View

Jurgen Appelo has posted about the #STOOS Network and its focus on management improvement. I followed a link to Steve Denning's materials. All good stuff at the principles level. What came to mind through these voices is the difference between... Read more →

Hierarchy of descriptions of DONE

The Five process areas of a successful project or program are. There is a hierarchy for applying of these principles: Needs, Goals, and Objectives - business direction based on higher level objectives. Business Unit requirements - structure, relationships, governing principles,... Read more →

Program Management

Tuesday night Dr. James T. Brown is speaking on the Principles of Program Management. I've reviewed the book and attended a previous talk at the Colorado Springs PMI Chapter. This time, I'm bringing my book for a signature. If you... Read more →

How to calculate Phi with a ruler and protractor

I was searching through the file server looking for a paper written long ago and came across a drawing I had made for a "lunch and learn" after the deVinci Code came out. The Golden Ratio Phi is 1.6180223.... Here's... Read more →

Yet another misunnderstanding of Earned Value

Roger Kent posted a comment in the current edition of PMI's PM Network. It's one of those posts that causes a twitch to appear in me if for the only reason there is a PMI logo on the material. Let's... Read more →

Quote of the Day

And the future is certain Give us time to work it out The notion that the future can be forecast in the absence of probabilistic models is of course nonsense. Nonsense in the same way water fall is used as... Read more →

Changing the World? Let's Hope So

I'm not a big fan of the Let's Change the World school of management. But Jurgen Appelo's efforts at the #STOOS Gathering are of interest to me for several reasons: Management processes are my profession Change processes are hard, and... Read more →

We need better analogies

Jurgen Appelo has a nice post about the efforts to speed up the change in the management processes. While I don't share their goal for several reasons, it's still a good goal in principle. My experience is that management processes... Read more →

Replacing Google Reader Link with Twitter

Google used to have a really nice feature in the Reader. You could use a Chrome plugin to post a link to the Reader, make some comments, and then connect that submission to the Reader in this Blog. This was... Read more →