Herding Cats

Quote of the Day

Your breakdown is not my emergency Read more →

Risk Management is How Adults Manage Projects

A favorite blog is Critical Uncertainties where Matthew Squair writes about risk. Risk in broad terms. But risk in a narrow term is just as important and just as critical. Thanks to Matthew for the picture to the left and... Read more →

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That

When we encounter simple answers to complex problems, we need to not only be skeptical, we need to think twice about the credibility of the person posing the solution. A recent example is: The cost of software is not directly... Read more →

Agile Software Development in the DOD

I spoke at a workshop this week at The Nexus of Agile Software Development and Earned Value Management, OUSD(AT&L)/PARCA, February 19 – 20, 2015 Institute for Defense Analysis, Alexandria, VA. This meeting was attended by government and industry representatives to... Read more →

Self-Organization

Many in the Agile community like to use words like Self Organizing, Emergent, Complexity, and Complex Adaptive Systems, without actual being able to do the mathematics behind these concepts. They've turned the words into platitudes. This is the definition of... Read more →

Real Life Sources of Empirical Data for Project Estimates

In the #NoEstimates conversation, the term empirical data is used as a substitute for Not Estimating. This notion of No Estimates - that is making decisions (about the future) with No Estimates, is oxymoronic since gathering data and making decisions... Read more →

Intellectual Honesty of Managing in the Presence of Uncertainty

There was a post yesterday where the phrase embrace the intellectual honesty of uncertainty and a picture of Dice. I interpreted - possibly wrongly - that picture meant uncertainty is the same as tossing dice and gambling with your project.... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Our mathematical models are far from complete, but they provide us with schemes that model reality with great precision - a precision enormously exceeding that of any description that is free of mathematics - Roger Penrose - "What is Reality,... Read more →

Software Engineering is a Verb

I found this picture on the web. The OP didn't know where it came from so I have no attribution. It speaks volumes to the gap between knowing and doing. The notion of knowing and doing is at the heart... Read more →

Quote of the Day

I advise my students to listen carefully the moment they decide to take no more mathematics courses. They might be able to hear the sound of closing doors - James Caballero. "Everyone is a Mathematician," CAIP Quarterly 1989. When we... Read more →

A Theory of Speculation

Just started a new book The Physics of Wall Street: Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable. The seeds of decision making in the presence of uncertainty, started long ago with Louis Bachelier's A Theory of Speculation. This work, started in... Read more →

What's in a Domain?

When I hear about a process, a procedure, a tool, a method, an idea, and even an anti-process like #NoEstimates, I first ask in what domain is this applicable? And when the answer comes back, software I suspect the speaker... Read more →

Overarching Paradigm of Project Success

There is a tendency, and I do this as well, to focus on our own little corner of the universe. I've learned to recognize when I'm doing this and have been taught by several good Systems Engineering leaders and a... Read more →

Here, There Be Dragons

Jorion (2007) wrote that “Western Europe conquered the world because of a technological revolution that started from the attempts to measure the world.” In the same way, attempts to measure risk - (and its related project performance impacts) - more... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Ensure Good Data gets to the Bad Decision Makers This quote is from a DOD Contracting surveillance officer on the inability of some managers to use data for decision making. Making good decisions requires good data. Data about the future.... Read more →

What does it mean when we say 80% confidence in a number?

Confidence intervals are the means to measure population parameters. A concern in inferential statistics (making a prediction from a sample of data or from a model of that data) is the estimation of the population parameter from the sample statistic.... Read more →

Sources for Reference Class Forecasting

Reference Class Forecasting is a useful source of data for making estimates in a variety of domains. Eliminating Bias Through Reference Class Forecasting From Nobel Prize to Project Management: Getting Risks Right And some databases used for RCF Nederlandse Software... Read more →

Start with Problem, Than Suggest The Solution - Part Deux

A metaphor in agile development of building a transportation device in the picture below. There were a few tweets about stretching the metaphor, or my favorite of course you could build a car, if that's what you wanted. If You... Read more →