Herding Cats

Good Project Management Advice

Jesse Fewell has a nice post of how to deliver less and be more successful. What's interesting is this straight forward agile approach is also the straight forward IMP/IMS approach. Jesse has three major steps to success 1. Define Business... Read more →

The Higgs and its reason for being here

The question is why is there a Higgs Boson is commonly asked in our group of engineers and business neighbors. There are lots of good explanations. One is provided by the PhD Comics guys. Recently there was a question from... Read more →

What is Planning?

I found a nice definition of Planning that fits well with the Five Immutable Principles of project success. deciding what action to take and allocating the necessary resources in order to achieve the objective, meet the wishes of all those... Read more →

Another Nonsense Statistical Survey

Like the Chaos surveys of Standish, business surveys suffer from the same simple and simple minded statistical flaws. The article was about Netflix and how it is struggling against other providers in the customer service side. While providing good streaming... Read more →

Rings of Success

Olympic Rings featured in nearing everywhere these days. Those rings represent the 5 parts of the world which now are won over to Olympism and willing to accept healthy competition. While there is much talk about the projects of the... Read more →

Quote of the Day

"Let us sit on this log at the roadside," says I, "and forget the inhumanity, and ribaldry of the poets. It is in the glorious columns of ascertained facts and legalized measures that beauty is to be found. In this... Read more →

What Is Program Controls?

There is a discussion on the LinkedIn #ProjectControls forum. It started out with a simple question of what does PERTMaster do? PERTMaster is one of many tools that provides results from a schedule, showing the probability of completing on or... Read more →

The Critical Missing Element of Most Project Managment Methods

Most projects we come to for recovery or triage, we find there is a missing piece of the puzzle. No one knows what actual Capabilities are needed from the system when it is complete, or even what incremental capabilities are... Read more →

The Simplest Of Ideas

The simplest answer to the question what do I need for project success, comes from one of my favorite speakers - David Walker. Mr. Walker spoke at a EVM World conference. He is the former Comptroller of the United States.... Read more →

Planning means planning for success and for not-success

John Goodpasture has a nice post, that I'll repeat here for effect. The Korean War was planned to last only a few days so we did not plan anything in case things might go wrong. If you plan a war... Read more →

Federal Goes Agile

Jeff Sutherland has a post about agile in the Department of Defense. Good stuff, but there are some issue with "going agile" in the Federal IT space. The first is for contracts over $20M require Earned Value Management, per FAR/DFARS... Read more →

Quote of the Day

It is a capital mistake to thoerize in advance of the facts - Sherlock Holmes, to Watson, The Adventure of the Second Stain When there is conjecture about the outcome of some method, suggestion, or ancedotal opinion, it is always... Read more →

Principles of Project Dynamics

Jim Highsmith has a nice post about principles and practices. There is a concept about Practices without Principles as well. Here are 10 fundamental principles of how projects work, or should work, independent of any method or process. A principle... Read more →

How to Build a Black Hole

I know this odd, but I was asked the other day, around the Higgs Boson news how does a Black Hole work? I needed an answer that was beyond the populist one of the gravity is so strong nothing can... Read more →

Quote of the Day

“Measure what can be measured and make measurable that which cannot be measured.” —attributed to Galileo Galilei This notion that measurements should not be done for things that are not measurable is of course nonsense. If you're spending other people... Read more →

Practice without Principles Does Not Scale

The Checklist Manifesto suggests all success comes from practice based on principles. Here's the current discussion of both the principles and practices needed for project success. Performance based planning in a nut shell (V5) View more presentations from Glen Alleman... Read more →

Plan of the Day

(Yes, this is from the Ward Room of the USS Midway) There have been several posts on LinkedIn about status meetings and Blogs about similar things and minutes from these meetings. All suggest various durations, topics, methods of capturing the... Read more →

Now That The Holiday Has Passed

With the celebration over for the 4th of July and our nations birthday properly recognized, let's pause to remember that it is peace we seek. The efforts toward that peace do not start with bravado, but with solemn remembrance of... Read more →

Quote of the Day - Leaders

Most of the ladies and gentlemen who mourn the passing of the nation’s leaders wouldn’t know a leader if they saw one. If they had the bad luck to come across a leader, they would find out that he might... Read more →

Fourth of July Celebration

With 123 out of 192 (or so) nations in the world with democratic forms of government, let us consider on this Fourth of July our obligations when we use pharses like freedom is not free and portray the image of... Read more →