Herding Cats

Quote of the Day

"I don't see much sense in that," said the Rabbit. "No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn't." "But there was going to be when I began it. It's just that something happened along the way." - A.A. Milne In the management... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. -- Albert Einstein Read more →

Learning from mistakes is overrated

In a classic quote "...I have never really learned much of anything from success..... The lessons which stick with me are those which I learned through failure ... " It is clear that something needs to be done about this... Read more →

The World of Probability and Statistics

This is from an article about the application of Bayesian Statistics to a civil suit in the UK over the source of a building fire. The idea that you can assign probabilities to events that have already occurred, but where... Read more →

Pi Day

In case you forgot the Value in useful form And then just to make a point Read more →

Why as a nation we have trouble with fact based discussions

When we get into discussions about policy, spending money, especially government money, and the outcomes from that spend, we as a nation are ill equipped to handle the facts. Not because the facts tell us thing we don't want to... Read more →

Probabilistic Cost and Schedule Processes

We hear all the time about how project managers can't make credible schedules or generate credible cost estimates for IT project or even other types of projects - mega project construction for example. I'd have to say Flyvbjerg is a... Read more →

What is Project Management About?

It seems the movement toward "communicating" is now the basis of many PMI symposiums. But communicating about what. Communicating between the generations, communicating about our personal needs, communicating with the customer. But what are we communicating about. Without the basis... Read more →

Alert - 10th Anniversary of the Columbia Loss

10 years ago last month, the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost when reentering the atmosphere over California. NASA held a one day conference at George Washington University. CSPAN has a set of videos of the conference. These session provide insight... Read more →

Quote of the Day

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” - Arthur Conan Doyle A Case of Identity Read more →

Deterministic versus Stochastic Trends in Earned Value Management Data - Update

Trending is a critical tool in forecasting the future performance of a project. "We've be doing this well for awhile now, what's going to happen in the future?" is a very common question for project management to ask of the... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The data may not contain the answer. The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data... - John Tukey Read more →

Project Success

There is a discussion on LinkedIn that asked "How do you define project success?" The suggestion there are two dimensions of project success - product and process seems a bit narrow and absent any domain or context. PMI defines a... Read more →