Herding Cats

Five Immutable Principles of Project Success and Project Failure

I saw a blog post about the Top 5 Reasons Your Project Fails recently. They were all good reasons, but those reasons were symptoms, not causes. We seem to always identify the symptoms, but until we fix the cause of... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Never attribute to malevolence what is explicable by incompetence. - Robert J Halon When we hear all the bad things that go wrong with projects. The misuse and abuse of data, people, tools, and processes, I get a smile when... Read more →

Estimating Resources

There's a never-ending opportunity to learn how to estimate in the presence of uncertainty. Here's some resources for informing that learning process. When you hear that estimates are a waste (we'd rather be coding), estimates are fiction, we're bad at... Read more →

Agile Estimating Methods and Impact on Project Development Performance Index

The presentation "Quantifying the Impact of Agile Practices," Larry MacCherone at the RallyOn 2013 Conference, presents some results on estimating impacts. The chart below shows 4 estimating types, including No Estimates, the sample sizes for each type and the components... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The essence of mathematics is to not make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple - Stan Gudder This notion that estimating is hard, estimates are a waste because they are always wrong, willfully ignores the basic mathematics... Read more →

9/25/16 — Happy Pythagorean Square Day!

From Patrick Honner Read more →

Where Are We Going, Doesn't Much Matter It Seems

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where–” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which... Read more →

Business Dysfunction, Malfunction and Strategy

Mike Cottmeyer posted This is an interesting article that misses the point of what's going on. Companies have too much management because they are poorly architected and not organized around value producing assets. When you don't have sufficient encapsulation, you... Read more →

Quote of the Day

While this quote appears inverted in our self-centered world, the expert has eliminated the nonsensical, naive, amateur, simple minded options and narrowed the choices based principles, practices, and processes of her profession. It is trivially easy to assert I'm exploring... Read more →

Book of the Month

The SAFe Reference Guide is out. The website has most everything you need, but it is hard to use and when printed in simplified mode doesn't contain the embedded pictures. In our local Agile Meetup at Rally, Charles Bradley went... Read more →

The #NoEstimates Paradigm and Response

Thanks to Sean Craig's Live Sketch Note for capturing concepts directly from Woody Zuill's talk. This is a good starting point for answering the mail on the notion that decisions can be made in the presence of uncertainty without estimating... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Thought interferes with the probability of events, and in the long run therefore, with entropy - David L. Waston (1930) All project work is probabilistic, driven by underlying uncertainties, both reducible and irreducible. Willing an outcome in the presence of... Read more →

Quote of the Day

It is probably dangerous to use this theory of information in fields for which it was not designed, but I think the danger will not keep people from using it - J. C. R. Lickider (1950) Related articles Architecture -Center... Read more →

Trust But Verify

The mantra of Agile is Trust the team. In some domains, that is an admirable goal. In other domains it's a naïve path to disaster. I work in the latter domain, on mission critical, sometimes national asset programs, but always... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The perfect symmetry of the whole apparatus - the wire in the middle, the two phones at the ends and the two gossips at the ends of the telephones - may be very fascinating to a mere mathematician - James... Read more →

Single Factor Analysis and Reduction Reasoning

Much of the discussion around project management processes, especially around agile, and most especially around the misconceptions of Estimating as espoused by the #NoEstimates advocates, starts with the misuse of reductive reasons based on single factor analysis. Here's how it... Read more →

Quote of the Day - Trust But Verify

Crede Sed Proba Trust is a core attribute of Agile Software Development. But any non-trivial business venture will also what to verify that to outcomes of the work effort are going to meet the needs of those paying, at the... Read more →

Quote of the Day

What I cannot create, I do not understand - Richard Feynman, from his blackboard at the time of his death Feynman spoke at our Society of Physics Students at UC Irvine. His was the penultimate teacher of all things physics Read more →

Quote of the Day

I forgot something important that you must remember until you go six feet under…. There are only two kinds of people in the whole wide world, grifters and suckers…. [With suckers,] let their stupid brains stay asleep in their chump... Read more →

The Origins of Scrum and Empirical Closed Loop Control

I came across a couple of interesting tweets over the weekend (Scrum is) more defined rather than empirical process. Agile in name only. scrum, not agile. not as it was prior to scrum. lost art. Scrum is prescriptive and defined... Read more →