Herding Cats

Let's Stop Guessing and Learn How to Estimate

There is a popular - but seriously misinformed - notion that making estimates is the same as guessing. It's not clear how this notion came about, since I haven't talked directly with those making statement like that. I'll have to... Read more →

What Software Domain Do You Work In?

When we hear about software development methods, it's critical to understand in what domain they are applicable. Here's an analogy for that question. Without an answer to this question there is no basis for comparing units of measure. What might... Read more →

How To Estimate, If You Really Want To (Updated)

The recent post about the 5 Ways To Rethink Software Projects has elicited a response from the author stating I was being unfair to his thesis that in the end - Number 5 - we didn't need to make estimates.... Read more →

Five Ways To Rethink Software Projects

Matt Heusser's article brings up some interesting points. Let's look to see if there are any limitations from a domain or context point of view. By domain I mean, in what taxonomy are you writing software for money. By context... Read more →

Quote of the Day

When managing projects that are funded by other people's money, we are obligated to know something about the probabilistic outcomes of our work. Without the ability to make forecasts and estimates of these outcomes , we are relegated to the... Read more →

How To Create Confusion About Root Causes

The NPR story about the Affordable Care Act web site is one of those out of your domain stories. (follow picture link to story) that we see in the popular press. First is the way over generalized descriptions of Waterfall... Read more →

Producing value using other peoples money

Attending and speaking at the Integrated Program Management Conference. Several themes have emerged during the past two days, one more to go. All project progress is measured independent of resources expended - Mr. Gary Bliss, Director, Performance Assessment and Root... Read more →

Statistical Process Control The Basis of All Modern Control Systems

All project elements are actually random variables. Funding, productivity, quality, efficiency, cost, schedule, risk, reliability - all the illities actually. All the independent and dependent variables of any project. The project can be a construction project - pouring concrete and... Read more →

Quote of the Day

All decision making starts with a domain and context. Without domain and context we have no way to understand the environment in which we operate and the well defined objectives needed to assess our decision making process. We have no... Read more →

Black Swans and "They Never Saw It Coming"

There is a great blog post on TechWell about Black Swans and project failure. IT project failure, but any project failure is appropriate. There some important points here on several fronts. For projects to actually fail means there were events... Read more →

One of the Problems with Emergent Design

Unless we know what capabilities we need at the end of the project, and know those somewhere near the beginning of the project, have a Plan to produce those capabilities at the needed time for an anticipated budget, we're going... Read more →

Quote of the Day

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or... Read more →

Statistics, Bad Statistics, and Damn Lies

It is popular to use the quote Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics to counter some statement about a probabilistic behaviour. The origin of this phrase remains unknown, but it is popularly attributed to Sir Charles Dilke. Another likely false attribution... Read more →

Straight Forward, Logical Approaches to Spending Other Peoples Money

There is a tendency in some of agile communications to mix up self actualization of the staff with the stewardship responsibility for spending other peoples money. We must have staff working the project who want to work on the project.... Read more →

Quote of the Day - Correlation, Causation, and Statistics

Statistics rule our lives. Traffic patterns for our commute to work, probabilistics weather anywhere you live. Your 401(k) earnigs reports that comes every month. For projects all the elements are statistically driven. The productivity of the engineers or developers. The... Read more →

Can There Be Successful Projects With Fixed Dates, Fixed Budgets, and Promised Minimal Features?

In a recent discussion it was mentioned there is no such thing as a fixed delivery date with fixed features. This of course is not actually the case when you look at complex, high risk, high reward, software intensive programs... Read more →

Quote of the Day

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 This is the John Tukey of the Cooley-Tukey Fast... Read more →

Capabilities Based Planning in an Agile Development Paradigm

Many approaches to ERP focus on "requirements" which are not connected to the business strategy. If you're familiar with balanced scorecard, the connection of project indicators of success with business indicators of success starts here. This business centric approach assures... Read more →

Can Agile Be Integrated with Governance Based Development Processes?

The discussion of applying agile in a variety of domains is fraught with opinion, ancedotes, you're sky is a different color than mine, I'm not interested in discussing any further, style of discourse. This of course is not the way... Read more →

All Value Production Is Time Phased

When the phrase we focus on producing value for the customer is used, there is a concept missing. Most customers need or expect that value to arrive on-time and over-time. In other words receiving the value from the project all... Read more →