Herding Cats

A Diversion

My Brother-In-Law came to visit us in Colorado a few weeks ago. He works on his off days at a soaring center in California and had this video from his group. Notice the variometer (the vertical feet per minute up... Read more →

Memorial Day

In memory of those who served and those who have fallen Read more →

How To Manage In The Presence Of Risk

When We Say Risk What Do We Really Mean?

The term risk is tossed around way too easlily these days. Just like we toss around complexity, complex, or those other terms that have self induced confusions - leadership versus management, complex versus complexity, coaches versus mentors, responsibility versus accountability... Read more →

Trust but Verify and Other Realistic Approaches

Lately there have been several voices that resonant with my World View. Ronald Regan's "trust but verify" is a phrase many times forgotten in our project management and process improvement world. I came across Carol Deckers through a twitter reference... Read more →

Shouldn't Complexity Theory and Emergent Systems Start with the Mathematics?

The answer of course is a resounding yes. If we can calculate something we don't have to rely on hand waving, references to populist articles that do their own hand waving, or at least references to dead people who did... Read more →

If We're Going To Make Improvements, We Have To Be Able To Calculate Real Numbers

There are nearly unlimited sources of advice on how to make improvements to nearly anything we could imagine. Not just personal improvements, but business improvements, management improvements, project improvements, technical improvements, world improvements. I have a bias here shared by... Read more →

Agile Project Management

Kelly's Contemplation has a nice post on The 3 Phases of an Agile Project. He starts the example with receiving a project that has few actual requirements. The notion of a traditional - or better yet conventional - approach to... Read more →

Quote of the Day

"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for." - Socrates But rememeber, you've got to provide attribution, otherwise they'll think you're a poser. Taking credit for... Read more →

The 5 Whys and Good Project Management

The notion of asking 5 Whys is part of Six Sigma processes in a variety of domains. Seeking the Root Cause, in a Root Cause Analysis, to standard practice in manufacturing and business processes. In the Project Management domain, this... Read more →

Planning

This is my favorite quote around planning. Mike is an email colleague. We've never met in person, we've talked on the phone and extensively through email. This quote has been the basis of our extension of Capabilities Based Planning for... Read more →

Quote of the Day

What phyiscs tells us about the universe is it's big, rare events happen all the time including life, and that doesn't mean it's special. - Lawerence Krauss's letcure on Dark Matter and the reason for the universe Read more →

Has Your Theory Been Battle Tested?

I'm working on proposal for deploying agile in a federal agency. They have a need to integrate Agile on the development of standard business systems. The first steps are to determine what existing software development processes are in place, what... Read more →

Planning, Plans, and Execution of the Plan

An interview with Jeff Sutherland and Hank de Velde brings up some important notions in program and project management. The planning horizon is short Plans must adapt to emerging situations Goals are maintained But there are some critically important aspects... Read more →

Word Map for Recent Blogs

Definitions, Yes They Are Important

Just finished reviewing my notes from a DAU course on Earned Value and the validation of Earned Value Management Systems (EVMS). In the first hours of the first day, there is a slide that admonishes the students to: Use precise... Read more →