Herding Cats

Who's Budget is it Anyway?

When we hear things like ... Why promising nothing delivers more and planning always fails, or It's in doing the work that we discover the work that we must do, or If estimates were real the team wouldn't have to... Read more →

Memorial Day

In case you thought it was about the 3 day weekend, parties, and the beach Thanks to all my neighbors, friends, and colleagues for their service. Read more →

The Dysfunctional Approach to Using "5 Whys" - Redux

It's been popular recently in some agile circles to mention we use the 5 whys when asking about dysfunction. This common and misguided approach assumes - wrongly - causal relationship are linear and problems come from a single source. For... Read more →

Software for the Mind

The book Software for Your Head was a seminal work when we were setting up our Program Management Office in 2002 for a mega-project to remove nuclear waste from a very contaminated site in Golden Colorado. Here's an adaptation of... Read more →

We've Been Doing This for 20 Years ...

We've been doing this for 20 years and therefore you can as well Is a common phrase used when asked in what domain does you approach work? Of course without a test of that idea outside the domain in which... Read more →

Essential Reading List for Managing Other People's Money

Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think - Albert Einstein So if we're going to learn how to think about managing the spending of other peoples money in the presence of uncertainty,... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Any process that does not have provisions for its own refinement will eventually fail or be abandoned - W. R. Corcoran, PhD, P.E., The Phoenix Handbook: The Ultimate Event Evaluation Manual for Finding Profit Improvement in Adverse Events, Nuclear Safety... Read more →

Monte Carlo Simulation of Project Performance

Project work is random. Most everything in the world is random. The weather, commuter traffic, productivity of writing and testing code. Few things actually take as long as they are planned. Cost is less random, but there are variances in... Read more →

Just Because You Say Words, It Doesn't Make Then True

When we hear words about any topic, my favorite of course is all things project manage, it doesn't make them true. Earned Value is a bad idea in IT projects because it doesn't measure business value Turns out this is... Read more →

The Fallacy of the Planning Fallacy

The Planning Fallacy is well documented in many domains. Bent Flyvbjerg has documented this issue in one of his books, Mega Projects and Risk. But the Planning Fallacy is more complex than just the optimism bias. Many of the root... Read more →

There is No Such Thing as Free

When our children were in High School, I strongly suggested they both take an economics class. Our daughter came home one day and announced at the dinner table Dad, we learned something important today in Economics Class. Whats that dear?,... Read more →

Do The Math

All project work is probabilistic. All decision making in the presence of probabilistic systems requires making estimates of future emerging outcomes. But to do this properly we need to have a standard set of terms that can form the basis... Read more →

Mr. Franklin's Advice

So what does this actually mean in the project management domain? Plans are strategies for the success of the project. Strategies are hypothesis. Hypothesis needs to be tested to determine their validity. These tests - in the project domain -... Read more →

Let's Stop Guessing and Start Estimating

What’s the difference between estimate and guess? One way to distinguish between them is degree of care taken when we arrive at a conclusion. A conclusion about how much effort work will take. How much it will cost to perform... Read more →

A Framework for Managing Other Peoples Money

Managing other people's money - our internal money, money from a customer, money from an investor - means making rational decisions based on facts. In an uncertain and emerging future, making those decisions means assessing the impact of that decision... Read more →

How We Make Decisions is as Important as What We Decide.

Working over the week on a release of a critical set of project capabilities and need a break from that. This post will be somewhat scattered as I'm writing it in the lobby to get some fresh air. Here's the... Read more →

Fit for Purpose and Fit for Use

In the governance paradigm there are two terms used to test ideas, processes, and their outcomes. Fit for Purpose and Fit for Use Both these terms are used to describe value of an IT outcome. A product or service value... Read more →

Forecasting the Future is Critical to All Success

Full attribution to Gaping Void for this carton. http://gapingvoid.com/2010/05/03/daily-bizcard-11-fred-wilson/ Wayne makes realtime estimates on every skate stroke of where he is going, where the puck is going, and where all the defensemen are going to be when he plans to... Read more →