Herding Cats

Increasing the Probability of Project Success (PoPS)

All project work, agile or traditional, operates in the presence of uncertainty. There are four fundamental root causes of Project or Program Failure, and their drivers that are addressed by Risk Management and the Estimating processes that go with them.... Read more →

Lessons Learned from the Space Shuttle Columbia

C-Span event part of a conference hosted by George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs on the 10th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Panelists talked about the lessons learned from the Columbia Space Shuttle tragedy ten years... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest,... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it." The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain one's own or anyone else's - Justin Kruger and David Dunning, in "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The estimator’s charter is not to state what developers should do, but rather to provide a reasonable projection of what they will do. – T. DeMarco, Controlling Software Projects, Prentice Hall PTR, 1982. This quote is from the paper "Quantifying... Read more →

Start with the End in Mind

The notion - a fallacious notion - that done will emerge, is common in some circles of Agile and especially those agile advocates proferring No Estimates. The Greeks and Romans had a good understanding of most things we take for... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Although we often hear that data speaks for themselves, their voices can be soft and sly - Frederick Mosteller, Stephen E. Fienberg, and Robert E. K. Bourke, Beginning Statistics with S=Data Analyusism Reading Massachusetts, 1983, pp. 234. Read more →

Word of the Day

I've started a new topic for the Blog, thanks to several Tweeter friends The first word of this thread is. Solipsism - a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - Martin Luther King Read more →

Quote of the Day

The only way to have a perfect system is to have perfect humans design and operate the systems. That is not possible. So failures will happen. ‐ Dr. Lawrence Chung Read more →

Quote of the Day

Negligent speech doth not only discredit the person of the Speaker, but it discrediteth the opinion of his reason and judgment; it discrediteth the force and uniformity of the matter, and substance - Ben Johnson, London 1614, first printed in... Read more →

Quote of the Day

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled - Richard P. Feynman, What do You Care What Other People Think? Read more →