Herding Cats

Quote of the Day - How Do We Know What "Done" Looks Like?

"You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." - Yogi Berra When you hear the suggestion that estimating is somehow of little or no value to the project, ask... Read more →

Fooled By Randomness

It is popular in the agile software development business to quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets The very first thing to establish is the randomness Taaleb speaks about... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Put you CFO hat on, all business is driven by cost. If not they won't be in business long COO of a major grocery store chain to the suggestion that not estimating the cost of a development project is better... Read more →

Flash Blog - What Does Project Management Mean To Me?

When Shim asked I write a blog about what project management means to me I first thought that would be easy. I'd just write about how I came to project management from my software development past and how managing software... Read more →

Moving from "Why" to "What" Actions are Needed?

The notion of exploring for dysfunction is actually an easy to do. Just make list of the things you don't like. As Robert Glass mentions in his book Quotes like those from Jeffery and Landsbaum seem to be treated like... Read more →

Coming to the Table with Facts Improves the Conversation

One of the references on the estimating discussion is from a paper, Managing programming productivity, D.R. Jeffery, M.J. Lawrence, showing a table where not estimating had a higher productivity. Of course the post didn't provide any insight to the units... Read more →

Estimating Accuracy

When the discussion of estimates starts from the point of view of developers that have not worked in domains where cost, schedule, and technical performance estimates are the norm - in fact are the bread and butter of the project... Read more →

Nice Estimating Example

Diego Bash has a nice post about the difficulties of estimating when you don't have the right skills, experience, capabilities, or reference needed to make a credible estimate. The Nice story on Quora (link and login required) about a hike... Read more →

It's Not the People It's the Process, Or Is It?

A recent post from Quantum Shifting describes the issues between peoples behaviour and the system they work in. As a "systems person," I'm on both sides of the discussion on how to increase the Probability of Project Success. On the... Read more →

Ten Agile Take Aways

Today was the Webinar discussing how to integrate Agile software development processes with an ANSI-748-B validated program. In the email came the paper below. This report can be ordered at the ISBSG site. It speaks to productivity, cost, time-to-market, quality,... Read more →

A Critical Concept in All Discussions of Project Process Improvement

The various threads, notions, theologies in improving the Probability of Project Success (PoPS) have all addressed the writing of software, production of value from that software - all the motherhood and apple pie statements we know and love around agile.... Read more →

Installing Earned Value Management on Your Project

There have been several posts and discussions on LinkedIn about applying Earned Value Management to projects. This coming Thursday, I'll be talking about applying Agile software development processes to Earned Value Management project, but in order to do that we... Read more →

Quote of the Day - More Statistics for Decision Making

The notion that we can make decisions about the future without somehow knowing the possible behaviours we will encounter in this future is naive at best and is doomed to fail at worse. Here's some advice from others on this... Read more →

How To and How Not To Make Credible Estimates of Cost and Schedule

Ester Derby posted a thought provoking topic on estimating and estimates. Ester is a well known and respected speaker, writer, and consultant. But Ester seems to have fallen into a common trap of tossing around ideas about probability, statistics, estimating,... Read more →

Key Note Speaker

5 immutable principles of project success (v2)(notes) from Glen Alleman Read more →

Quote of the Day

When schemes are laid in advance, it is surprising how often the circumstances fit in with them — Sir William Osler The notion of emergent anything without some understanding of what done looks likes lays the groundwork for spending without... Read more →