Herding Cats

Alert - 10th Anniversary of the Columbia Loss

10 years ago last month, the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost when reentering the atmosphere over California. NASA held a one day conference at George Washington University. CSPAN has a set of videos of the conference. These session provide insight... Read more →

Alert - GAO Report on Project Suuccess Includes Agile SW Dev

Aaron Smith of Projects@Work, tweeted that the GAO report INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Critical Factors Underlying Successful Major Acquisitions provides 9 success factors for government IT projects. Agile is mentioned for several of the projects: Veterans Affairs Occupational Health Record-keeping System Defense... Read more →

Alert - Just So We Don't Get Confused As To The Source Of Our Little Problem

Alert - Robert Glass Book

Robert Glass's book Software Conflict 2.0 is a collection of essays about the art and science of developing software for money. In my domain software is a critical success for the safety and mission assurance of the products. Agile development... Read more →

Agile and EVM?

There is an initiative to connect Agile Software Development with Earned Value Management. I've talked a couple of times on this topic. While here at the PMI College of Performance Management - the Earned Value Community of Practice - conference... Read more →

Alert - Earned Value is not the same as Business Value

Scott Ambler writes again about the use of Earned Value on IT projects. Scott makes several fundamental errors in this discussion. The ANSI-748B version of "earned value" is NOT the same as business value. It never has been, it never... Read more →

Alert - Canadian Forces Software Course

The Canadian Forces Intensive Course in Software Engineering contains many useful ideas applicable to current problems in enterprise class software projects. Read more →

Alert - How Not to Use Earned Value

In a recent post on PM Hut, it was suggested that the Earned Value Management terms should focus on the "value" of the outcomes of a project, rather than the measures of performance for the work efforts of a project.... Read more →

Alert - Oh My Gawd

We have found the enemy and he is us. Status of FY 2010 Federal Improper Payments Report. In paragraph two of the summary the number is $125,400,000,000. Yep $125.4 BILLION. Read more →

Alert - Australian Ministry of Defence

The Australian Ministry of Defence has a wonderful site for all kinds of guidance for acquisition activities, including risk management, systems engineering, technology management, project and programme (sic) management. Thanks to Shim Marom and Craig Brown for their inriduction to... Read more →

Alert - Enterprise Project Management

When the term Enterprise IT comes up there are a variety of "images" that come to mind. When the term "agile" and Enterprise IT comes up, the connection to Enterrise IT needs an a domain. Here's an example of Enterprise... Read more →

Alert - Cost Estimating of Agile Projects

The Department of Defense Data & Analysis Center for Software has a webinar titled Cost Estimation of Agile Projects: Agile Estimating Challanges. Take a look and listen to see and hear how agile is deployed in the US Department of... Read more →

Alert - Jobs?

If the economy adds about 208,000 jobs per month, which was the average monthly rate for the best year of job creation in the 2000s, then it will take until June 2023 — another 12 years — to close the... Read more →

Alert - NASA Toyota Report

The results of a ten-month study by 30 NASA engineers of possible electronic causes of unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles was released today by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). NASA found no evidence that a malfunction in electronics caused... Read more →

Alert - MIL-STD-881C

The next version of the Work Breakdown Structure guidance is out for review. MIL-STD-881C is now a Military Standard rather than a Military Handbook. Why do we care? Let me count the ways: Without a properly formed WBS, it is... Read more →

Alert - NASA to Change EVM Requirements

NASA proposes to scale back its requirements for establishing and maintaining an Earned Value Management System for firm-fixed price (FFP)contracts, in order to reduce the reporting burden and in recognition of the lower risk associated with FFP contracts. The proposed... Read more →

Aglie is Coming, Agile is Coming

The NDIA (National Defense Industry Association) Information Systems Summit II is being held in Baltimore April 4-6, 2011. For those not familiar with this organization, it is an industry group with members from industry and the government - both DoD... Read more →

Alert - Joint Strike Looses $11.5B

Daily or semi-daily blogging is some times not enough. I'm going to try out the notion of an ALERT. When the term "complex project" is mentioned here's an example. Joint Strike Fighter. The $380B (yes that is a Billion) program... Read more →