Herding Cats

A Compendium of Managing Complex Systems

The picture is used by a Complexity advocate to conjecture that complex systems cannot be managed. This is not correct, as many of the claims made by self-proclaimed complexity experts. I've seen this scene of flocking birds first hand. It... Read more →

Compendium of Works to Increase Probability of Project Success

This collection of presentations, briefings, journal and conference papers, essays, and book content has been used to increase the Probability of Project Success (PoPS) written and applied over my career in the software-intensive system of systems and other business and... Read more →

Book of the Month

Darwin's dangerous idea is the belief that evolution, a mindless, mechanistic, purposeless process, gave rise to the single, branching tree of life and, further, that this process eliminates the need for invoking an intelligent God as the source of the... Read more →

Book(s) of the Month

This book was given to me early in my career by a mentor. It makes a clear and concise statement ... If you're working in a dysfunctional organization and you're unable to make the needed improvements to a level that... Read more →

Book of the Month

Business, and the projects used to deliver products and services, relies in estimates, plans, projects - and we all know how accurate they tend be. Careers are made, careers are broken based on perceived accuracy in estimating and planning. But... Read more →

Book of the Month

In our current political turmoil, as well as project management and software development turmoil, claims are made - sometimes wild unsubstantiated claims - of how to NOT do something, how some process can fix your problems, without ever stating what... Read more →

Book of the Month

All project work operates in the presence of uncertainty. Uncertainty comes in two forms on projects and product development. Reducible uncertainty (Epistemic) and Irreducible uncertainty (Aleatory). There is a 3rd kind of uncertainty - Ontological - which is unknowable -... Read more →

Book of the Month

We all know - or hopefully, we all know - that correlation is not causation. Pearl's book (click on the book cover) speaks to the issue of cause and effect When we observe, especially in the project management domain, we... Read more →

Book of the Decade

It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy. It is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler's... Read more →

Book of the Month

In the presence of the Pseudoscience and willful ignorance of science in our current leadership, here are two books that should be read by everyone with skin in the game of being an informed citizen of the nation and the... Read more →

Leadership

Leadership is a topic critical to project management success. There are many voices on how to be a leader in this environment. Some advice is platitudes. Some are obvious. Some are nonsense. In a previous blog Leadership Lessons, Shackelton demonstrates... Read more →

Six Books for our Challenging Times

With seemingly unlimited voices shouting their message through all channels - from topical politics to how to spend our money, to how to spend other people's money, the level of volume increasing, with no simple way to sort out signal... Read more →

Book of the Month

This is the only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take... Read more →

Book of the Month

This is a book that changed my life. It was given to me in the late 1970's by a mentor. I'd lost the book, or given it away, got it back a few weeks ago. From the back cover... Some... Read more →

Book of the Month

This book is about networks and complexity and the modeling of complexy. Computer networks, social networks, genetic networks that impact all aspects of our lives and the lives of everyone on the planet. I came to this book through our... Read more →

Book of the Month

Bent Flyvbjerg's new book The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management arrived over Christmas. If you don't know of Bent's work, it's a source of must-read materials on managing projects. This text (from the back cover) is an important and certainly... Read more →

The Practitioner's Handbook of Project Performance

Our two chapters in The Practioner's Handbook of Project Performance: Agile, Waterfall and Beyond, edited by Mark Phillip's Routledge, 2019 is now out. Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 are principles and practices of risk management contributed by me, Tom Coonce,... Read more →

Book of the Month

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols. From the dust jacket - Thanks to technological advances and increasing levels of education we have access to more information than ever before. Yet rather... Read more →

Predicting the Unpredictable (A Book Review)

I came to this book with an anticipation of a coherent discussion of estimating on modern software development projects. The subtitle is Pragmatic Approached to Estimating Project Schedule and Cost, says I'd find practical advice on how to estimate software... Read more →

Book of the Month

From the preface: The software industry is one of the most successful industries in history and has created numerous billionaires and millionaires as well as given employment to millions of technology workers. Most forms of modern transportation such as automobiles,... Read more →