Herding Cats

Quote of the Day

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. - H. L. Mencken Read more →

Alert - Was Poor PM the Root Cause of ACA Difficulties?

Today's Wall Street Journal 28 Oct 2013, has a front page article on the difficulties with the Affordable Health Care (ACA) web site Health Site Stymied By Lack of Direction. There are lots of opinions going around on the source... Read more →

Big Systems Acquisitions - Lessons for ACA Web Site

There are endless discussions about what went wrong with the Affordable Care Act web site development and deployment. It'll be hard to tell at this early point in the project assessment. But what is clear is this was most likely... Read more →

The Value of Making An Estimate

Vasco Duarte asks an important question - what is the value of an estimate to the stakeholder of the project? This seems a simple enough. But the question is couched in the context of #NoEstimates. So taken at face value,... Read more →

Not Complicated But Hard

Discussion around managing projects and increasing the probability of success is many times focused on making things simpler. But simple only works on simple problems. Simple problems are not really that interesting if you adopt the Edwin Land view of... Read more →

What Do We Mean When We Hear The Word "Planning"

There is a post related to the #NoEstimates discussion titled, Introducing Deliberate Discovery. It's one of those interesting topics that doesn't use the same words across most domains. The word Plan in our domain is a Strategy for the successful... Read more →

Processes for Increasing the Probability of Project Success

There is nearly an unlimited amount of discussion on the web about projects, project success factors, project management methods, including software development methods and paradigms, and of course project management tools that support them. All of these are solutions looking... Read more →

What Kind of Software Projects Do You Work On? (Updated)

When we ask the question what software domain are you applying your improvement approach to? and the answer is software, it might be useful to put a framework around the answer to provide a basis for discussion. The figure below... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Anderson don't talk out loud, you lower the IQ of the entire street Sherlock Holmes to officer Anderson while working the case of Pink in Death a serial killer story Read more →

How To Estimate Almost Anything If You Really Want To

When we hear you can't forecast the future or we can't estimate the future without knowing about the past, we need to take a pause and consider what is being said and how to respond. The first response should be... Read more →

Is fine grained decomposition of work the same as "Not Estimating?"

Vasco Duarte has a nice presentation about his notion of No Estimates. It's clear and concise and answers the mail for what the heck is No Estimates all about. The answer is - there good ideas for flow based project... Read more →

Quote of the Day

There are several quotes that resonant with me on a near daily basis in the project management domain. All of these come from direct projects or programs. I don't agree with you, that's because I don't understand - it is... Read more →

Project Governance and Decision Rights

Project management principles and practices live inside of a governance framework. On software project the development of the software also lives inside a governance framework. Governance is the mechanism that defines the decision rights for the project and determines how... Read more →

They Never Saw It Coming

When we hear about new and innovative methods for managing projects, let's ask some questions: What domain and context are these approaches known to work in? Have they been applied in any domain and context we are interested in? Is... Read more →

Managing In The Presence Uncertainty - Redux

The notion of successfully managing a project starts - as always - with the 5 Immutable Principles of project success. What does done look like? - do we know what the customer wants? If the customer doesn't know, or can't... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Never calculate without first knowing the answer - John Archibald Wheeler When we work using other peoples money, we have an obligation to know what the all in cost is, or when we plan to be done, and if we... Read more →

Why We Confuse Development Methods with Risk Management

It is common to call our favorite sofware development method risk management. Agile calls itself risk management. #NoEstimate calls itself risk management. To be a risk management process, several things have to be in place. The source of any risk... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Every systematic development of any subject ought to begin with a definition, so that everyone may understand what the discussion is about. Marcus Tullius Cicero (196BC ‒ 16BC), De Officiis, Book 1, Moral Goodness When an idea is put forward,... Read more →

Quote of the Day

We don't try to predict the future in order to contol it, we try to predict the future to prepare a proper response to the possible emerging events. Those who are not engaged in estimating the possible outcomes of future... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Forecasting involves making projections about future performance on the basis of historical and current data - from "Time series Forecasting using Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing," Without current data and past performance data, no forecast of future data can be credible. Current... Read more →