Herding Cats

Capabilities Based Planning and Development

The Death March project starts when we don't know what DONE looks like. Many of the agile approaches attempt to avoid this by exchanged not knowing for budget and time bounds. In the enterprise IT domain, those providing the money,... Read more →

How to Deal With Complexity In Software Projects?

In a previous post on How to Assure Your Project Will Fail, the notion that the current project management processes are obsolete and the phrase of dealing with complexity on projects is a popular one in the software domain. By... Read more →

How To Assure Your Project Will Fail - UpDate

There is a short eBook titled Dealing with Complexity in Software Projects that can be downloaded by clicking on the image to the left. This book starts with the hypothesis put forth by Theory of Project Management: Explanation of Novel... Read more →

Memorial Day

We have given some, Some have given all Read more →

Bounded Applicability

“The basic concept of bounded applicability…simply states that any method or tool has limits. You know you are reaching those limits as the cost/benefit ratio of handling new issues becomes adverse. At this point you should not carry on doing... Read more →

Lesson from 40 Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Leaders

Get your copy of the lessons from project leaders. Tons of advice of project success, including some from me starting on on page 57. Related articles Learning from mistakes is overrated Read more →

Quote of the Day

“If a man gives no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.” — Confucius When you hear that we can't make estimates, we don't need to make estimates, we don't want to make estimates, because... Read more →

The Three Elements of Project Work and Their Estimates

There is still discussion of estimating that starts with fixing the budget as the solution for No Estimating. This of course simply moves the estimating need to the other two elements of all project work. These three elements are: The... Read more →

To Stay In Business You Need to Know Both Value and Cost

I hear all the time, in agile we focus on value generation. Any viable business focuses on producing value for its products or services. Saying that is a tautology. There can be no viable business without some kind of value... 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 →

Four Critical Elements of Project Success

Four core components must be in place, have credible values, be used to make decisions, be connected to the actual performance of the project in a closed loop feedback system for the project to have any hope of success. SCHEDULE... Read more →

Project Finance

Projects are implemented by people. People aoply processes and tools during the implementation of the project. The People, Processes, and Tools paradigm is well worn and at the same time modern. From the very early days of formal project management... Read more →

Quote of the Day

All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. (G. K. Chesterton "on Gargoyles") When any claim is made on any topic, it needs to be backed by evidence of its applicability to the problem at hand. This... Read more →

A Paradigm Realization

We attended a performance of Gustav Holst's The Planets at CU Boulder this week. Its was a combined media show, with music from the CU Orchestra (undergrad and grad music students) and a visual presentation of planetary pictures from the... Read more →

There is no such thing as free

When we here about writing software for money and in the same breath that this can be done without knowing the cost of that effort - fixing the cost simply transfers the uncertainty to the number of capabilities and the... Read more →