Herding Cats

Year End Summary

Thanks to my 17,000 readers. It's been a busy year. Working on both the policy and execution side of large progams. Finished the book after 9 months work, coming in Feburary. The year ended with a focus on estimating and... Read more →

How to Fib With Statistics

Todd Little and Steve McConnell use a charting method that collects data from projects and then plots it in the following way. For Little's data its the initial estimated duration versus the actual duration. and for McConnell's data it's the... Read more →

Start with Capabilities

When we start talking about anything and everything to do with project management, it's best to start with the end in mind. What is this project supposed to provide for the customer? What Capability will the customer posses when the... Read more →

3 Impediments To Actual Improvement in the Presence of Dysfunction

We didn't know that our problem has been solved before We didn't do our home work and look at what others have done to improve in similar situations. We didn't look for the root cause of our problem to see... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about - Benjamin Franklin When there are simple and many times simple minded platitudes about solving complex and many times wicked or intractable problems in our project management world, think... Read more →

'Twas the Night Before Baseline

Twas the Night Before Baseline (With apologies to Clement Clarke Moore) Twas the eve for the holidays, And all through the shop, Our consultants were working, Would they ever get to stop? All the CAMs had corrected their IMSs with... Read more →

Quote of the Day

For it is your business, when the wall next door catches fire - Horace The notion of challanging everything without providing either the root cause, an example beyond personal opinion, peer reviewed samples from an appropriate domain, counter examples for... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to farther progress. - Samuel Johnson There of course the phrase Curiosity killed the cat, which... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Reality is never so tidy - Sherlock Holmes When we hear of tidy fixes to complex problems, remember Sherlock. Before deciding that any idea is viable for improving our lot in life around project success, ask if the suggested solution... Read more →

Three Kinds of Uncertainty About the Estimated Cost and Schedule

There is a post that references a concept I've come to use that puts uncertainty into three classes. This post it not exactly what I said, so let me clarify it is bit. First some background. I work on an... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The notion of Challange Everything is likley one that produces little progress without understanding first what the Root Cause is the observed problems are. To discover the root causes we must seperate out observations from our personal biases. The root... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Order of Apparent Chaos - I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expresses by the "Law of Frequency Error." The law would have been personified by the Greeks and... Read more →

Honored to be in Great Company

Below is a list of the most popular top 25 project management blogs that have been visited from ProjectNewsToday.com over the past year. Herding Cats PMI Blog - Voices on Project Management QuantmLeap Arras People - How to Manage a... Read more →

Risk Management for Dummies

It's that easy and it's that hard. If you don't have a handle on what risks are going to impact your project, those risks will still be there, you just won't know it. The first step in increasing the probability... Read more →

Quote of the Day

"Planning constantly peers into the future for indications as to where a solution may emerge. A Plan is a complex situation, adapting to an emerging solution." - Mike Dwyer, Big Visible Charts When we hear about unchangeable requirements, fixed budgets,... Read more →

The Missing Domain, Context, and Evidence In Many Discussions

In Concepts of Mathematics, Ian Stewart, there is a math joke that goes like this... An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" — what are the... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Get the truth & print it - John S. Knight. Read more →

Domain and Context King

It has been suggested that context is somehow irrelevant. This notion seems to start around the criticism of the MoSCoW requirements method where requirements that implement the needed capabilities of a system are categorized. MoSCoW means: (how it got the... Read more →

Planning is Everything

Plans are nothing, Planning is Everything The notion that plans are nothing but planning is everything is a common mis-applied quote. The clip art and content extracted from the current edition of Defense Acquisition Journal, November-December, 2013. The ever-quotable Dwight... Read more →