Herding Cats

Estimate Anything

When I hear people talking at #NoEstimates I have to smile. When someone is paying you to spend their money and produce something of value with that money. When that someone has an expectation of that value arriving sometime in... Read more →

Quote of the Day

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg - Abraham Lincoln The notion that we can rename things and then assume they are... Read more →

How Not To Do Earned Value

The LinkedIn forum The Project Manager Network - #1 Group for Project Managers which I sometimes wonder if that is actually the case, has a conversation going on around project failure. A Master's student asked about project failure modes. That... Read more →

No Estimates Mean Better Estimates?

The conversation on Twitter around No Estimates #NoEstimates brings a smile. Here's some samples Marketing needs a rough idea of when alpha-level code will be available. Allowing a few weeks for alpha testing and a few more for beta testing... Read more →

No Estimates of Costs and Schedule?

There is a twitter discussion going on around Neil's post of People Need Estimates. This is a typical agile approach. No real domain or context, just a principle looking for a problem to solve. First let's establish some ground rules:... Read more →

Quote of the Day - How NOT to be a Risk-Informed Project Manager

Yes, this is an actual post on a LinkedIn forum When the role of the project manager is to push the rock up the hill and then let it roll down again, there is little chance of success, and in... Read more →

Analogies, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

There have several rounds of how to use analogies and how not to use analogies in the past few years. These involved notions like agile is an untended garden. Actually an untended garden and called a weed patch. Or we... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine. ‒ Johann Wolfgang Goethe Read more →

More Uncertainty and Risk

More discussion on LinkedIn about risk, risk management, types of risk, and definitions of risk and opportunity. The "risk management" community in the domains I work is based on Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, NASA,... Read more →

Maximizing Project Value - a Review - Chapter 2

Chapter 1 of Maximizing Project Value introduced the idea of value. Chapter 2 speaks to where and how that value flows. A couple years ago there was confusion about the term value. Let's restate it here again. The value John... Read more →

Cost (and Schedule) Estimating Foundations

Cost estimating methods have been around for a long time. The current processes found in agile use a points system, sometimes a Fibonacci series to bin the values of the points. The challenge with this approach is the estimate in... Read more →

Both Aleatory and Epistemic Uncertainty Create Risk

Over the past weeks there have been several discussions on the forums and Blogs amount risk and risk management. Here's a short post on those topics and their impact on project performance. Risk Comes from Uncertainty Risk does not exist... Read more →