Over the past 16 years of the Herding Cats blog, there have been a consistent collection of topics on topics critical the increasing the probability of project success. Here's the collection. It's incomplete but will be complete soon.
- Project Management - Project management is defined as a collection of proven techniques for proposing, planning, implementing, managing, and evaluating projects, combined with the art of managing people. It is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to a broad range of activities to meet the specified requirements of a particular project. There are many project management techniques and tools, and considerable differences in applying these methods to different projects. But the basic principles, practices, and processes are universal
- Risk Management - is the critical success factor for project success. Capabilities, requirements, cost, and schedule planning and execution are of course crucially important. But extensive research on the government and civil side of project management - no matter the domain or context - shows that projects fail because of poorly managed uncertainties that create risk.
- Capabilities Based Planning - is the starting point for all project success. No requirements, not cost and schedule, not resource management. Without having a clear and concise understanding of what capabilities are required from the project to complete the mission or fulfill a business strategy, the project has little hope of success.
- Root Cause Analysis - answers the question of why is this risk present and why did the project fail and what are the conditions and actions create risk resulting in failure.
- Agile Development - is now fully buzzword-compliant with salesmen pitching solutions looking for a problem to solve. Debunking the agile pitches is straightforward, by asking for tangible evidentiary materials (a phrase used in our Federal Acquisition Regulation procurement world) to simply show me in units of measure meaningful to the decision-maker.
- Earned Value Management - is a project management technique for measuring project performance and progress in an objective manner. This objective manner starts with defining the planned Physical Percent Complete for a product or service, at a planned time, with the planned measures of technical, cost, or schedule performance.
- Agile Software Development - Agile is the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way of dealing with, and ultimately succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent environment.
- Estimating - is a critical success factor for all projects in the presence of uncertainty. There a good ways to estimate and there are poor ways. Little is spoken about estimating in the agile world and on the other end of the spectrum estimating (even agile software project estimating) is a Profession in the domains I work.
- Monte Carlo Simulation - Monte Carlo Simulation is a multiple probability simulation mathematical technique, used to estimate the possible outcomes of an uncertain event. The Monte Carlo Method was invented by John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam during World War II to improve decision-making under uncertain conditions. In project management. MCS is used to model cost, schedule, and technical performance in the presence of uncertainties that create risk to the probability of project success
- Debunking #NoEstimates - The conjecture we can make decisions in the presence of uncertainty without estimating the impacts of those decisions is without any principles that can be tested beyond personal anecdotes of I know people who spend other peoples money without providing estimates.