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In our domain, Jon Katzenbach's definition of a team informs how we interact with our project members. A Team is defined as ... A group of qualified individual who hold each other mutually accountable for a shared outcome - Katzenbach,... Read more →
In software development, we almost always encounter situations where a decision must be made when we are uncertain what the outcome might or even the uncertainty in data used to make that decision. Decision making in the presence of uncertainty... Read more →
A Tweet caught my eye this weekend Before moving to risk let's look at what Agile is Agile development is a phrase used in software development to describe methodologies for incremental software development. Agile development is an alternative to traditional... Read more →
In the world of project management and the process improvement efforts needed to increase the Probability of Project Success anecdotes appear to prevail when it comes to suggesting alternatives to observed dysfunction. If we were to pile all the statistics... Read more →
It is conjectured that uncertainty can be dealt with ordinary means with open conversation, identification of the uncertainties and their handling strategies. That quantitative methods are too elaborate and unnecessary for problems except the most technical and complicated ones. When... Read more →
When we hear about software development in the absence of a domain, it's difficult to have a discussion about the appropriate principles, processes, and practices of that work. Here's one paradigm that has served us well. In the Software Intensive... Read more →
Steve McConnell's recent post on estimating prompted me to make one more post on this topic. First some background on my domain and point of view. I work in what is referred to a Software Intensive Systems (SIS) involving Introduction,... Read more →
Todd Little posted a comment on "How To Lie With Statistics," about his observations on the chart contained in that original post. As Todd mentions in his response The Cone of Uncertainty chart comes from the original work of Barry... Read more →
This is a summary post on the topic of #NoEstimates. Let's start with my professional observation. All are welcome to provide counter examples. Estimates have little value to those spending the money. Estimates are of critical value to those providing... Read more →
Decisions are about making Trade Offs for the project that are themselves about: Evaluating alternatives. Integrating and balancing all the considerations (cost, performance, Producibility, testability, supportability, etc.). Developing and refining the requirements, concepts, capabilities of the product or services produced... Read more →
How To Lie With Statistics is a critically important book to have on your desk if you're involved any decision making. My edition is a First Edition, but I don't have the dust jacket, so not worth that much beyond... Read more →
In a recent post of forecasting capacity planning a time series of data was used as the basis of the discussion. Some static statistics were then presented. With a discussion of the upper and lower ranges of the past data.... Read more →
The management of projects involves many things. Capabilities, Requirements, Development, Staffing, Budgeting, Procurement, Accounting, Testing, Security, Deployment, Maintenance, Training, Support, Sales and Marketing, and other development and operational processes. Each of these has interdependencies with other elements. Each operates in... Read more →
Let's start with a background piece on estimating. The Fermi Problem. A Fermi estimate is an order estimate of something. Not an order of magnitude (that's a 10X estimates, easy for anyone to make). These types of problems are encountered... Read more →
It is popular in some agile circle to use Waterfall as the stalking horse for every bad management practices in software development. A recent example is Go/No Go decisions are a residue of waterfall thinking. All software can built incrementally... Read more →
All the work we do in the projects domain is driven by uncertainty. Uncertainty of some probabilistic future event impacting our project. Uncertainty in the work activities performed while developing a product or service. Decision making in the presence of... Read more →
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