Herding Cats

Quote of the Day

There are thousands of ways to fail ... most have not been explored — Dr. Steve Jolly, IEEE Fourth International Conference of System of Systems Engineering in “System of Systems in Space Exploration: Is Software Broken?”, Steve Jolly, Albuquerque, New... Read more →

Value First, Requires Margin and Contingency

There's a popular notion in Agile that says Focus on Value. The principles of microeconomics of decision making in the presence of uncertainty mandates you make estimates of how to achieve that Value in terms of cost and schedule, those... Read more →

Fallacy of the Week

When you use a technology term to describe a customer value you've lost the customer. And you've made 1000 assumptions without knowing! Without a domain and context, this statement has no meaning. Let's say we use a technical term like... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge? - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Viking Penguin Inc, 1985, p. 108. Read more →

Shinny Objectives

Mike Cohn's letter today speaks about distractions from the agreed upon path. About bosses that can't stick to the plan, that change their mind when a new idea comes into their head. Mike suggests: ... you need to make sure... Read more →

Quote of the Day

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act — attributed to George Orwell, opening line in Icarus Read more →

Physical Percent Complete: Knowing When You Are Done

The goal of every program manager is to have a set of practices that connect all the programmatic planning, risk, and performance information in a single unified view needed to support the decisions that increase the probability of success of... Read more →

What is Strategy?

Strategy is a much overused, misused, and abused word. It's tossed around by those who are unfamiliar with Strategy Making roles in businesses. Strategy is creating fit among a company's activities. The success of a strategy depends on doing many... Read more →

Fallacy of the Week

Five Different Decision-Making Strategies That Don't Need Estimates This is a quote from a #Noestimates presentation. Remember, all projects operate in the presence of Uncertainty. If not, it's either a de minimus project, buying things from a catelog, and assemblying... Read more →

Software Cost Accounting

Money comes in many colors. Green here in the United States. Much prettier colors around the world. There is a saying in the project management business that money comes in two colors - Green and Blue. Green money has an... Read more →

Book of the Month

Improving Project Performance: Eight Habits of Successful Project Teams contains eight habits that are the basis for project success. Of course, project success is a probabilistic measure, so the title should read Eight Habits needed to Increase the Probability of... Read more →

Fallacy of the Week

NoEstimates (is) An Unconventional Approach That Finally Solves The "Deliver On Time!" Problem Let's deconstruct this conjecture. All project work operates in the presence of uncertainty. Epistemic uncertainty, in which there is a probability that something will happen in the... Read more →

Quote of the Day

A goal without a Plan is just a Wish - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944) Plans are strategies, strategies are a hypothesis, a hypothesis requires tests to assess their validity. Without a Plan, you have no means of knowing what Done... Read more →

Quote of the Day

An inescapable fact is that the causation of all serious harm includes multiple missed opportunities for multiple ordinary people, organizations, and groups to have prevented the harm entirely or the have greatly reduced it by doing ordinary things ordinarily well.... Read more →

The Art of Systems Architecting

Performance, Cost, and Scheduling cannot be specified independently. At least one of the three must depend on the others. With few exceptions, schedule delays will be accepted grudgingly, cost overruns will not, and for good reason. The time to completion... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Having knowledge is not enough, you have to know that acting on that knowledge will result in the desired outcome - Plato's Meno If you hear, this is the metric you need to know, ask you have any evidence that... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Where you stand on any question, depends on where you sit - Miles's law after the Truman-era bureaucrat who coined the phrase. Read more →

Quote of the Day

No plan survives contact with the enemy - Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke (1800 - 1891) This quote is often used by those in the agile community as an excuse for not having a Plan. von Moltke's quote means in... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Far from being close-minded killjoys, most scientists in the “never aliens” camp desperately want to be convinced otherwise. Their default skeptical stance is a prophylactic against the wiles of wishful thinking, a dare to true believers to provide extraordinary evidence... Read more →

Illogical Agile Quotes

There are lots of quotes flying around the agile community. Some are logical, some are obvious, some are takeoffs from other quotes, a few are downright nonsense. I won't embarrass the author by using his or her name. Here are... Read more →