Herding Cats

The Premises of Rational Management

Organizational Effectiveness is a basis of rational management. The organization is one of mankind's all-time greatest inventions. An organization is intended to operate as one unit, with all its parts in efficient coordination. But all too often it does not.... Read more →

Bad Management Behaviours

I belong to an invitation blog for military people. In a recent post, they shared a post from the York Region District School Board, D'Youville College, Aleksandr Noudelman about leadership. This post resonanted with me when I hear about simple... Read more →

Operations, Finance, and Accounting for the Development of Software

It's common to hear, projects are overhead, we just need to get the value to the customer as fast as possible. This seems to be a lament from agile developers. Anything getting in the way of the coding is seen... Read more →

Definition of Done

The common definition of the Definition of Done in agile software development is (mostly from the Scrum Alliance and other official Scrum sites): A simple list of activities (coding, comments, unit testing, integration, release notes, design documents, etc.) that add... Read more →

The Myth of Standish Reports - Update Number 2

The Standish Report is raising its head again in the Agile presentations I've seen recently at conferences. Forgetting for the moment all the past "criticisms" of Standish... Standish Report Standish Report and Naive Statistics Finally a Challenge to the Standish... Read more →

The #NoEstimates Paradigm and Response

Thanks to Sean Craig's Live Sketch Note for capturing concepts directly from Woody Zuill's talk. This is a good starting point for answering the mail on the notion that decisions can be made in the presence of uncertainty without estimating... Read more →

A Growth Job

Is never permanent. Makes you like yourself. Is fun. Is sometimes tedious, painful, frustrating, monotonous, and at the same time gives a sense of accomplishment. Bases compensation on productivity. Is complete: One thinks, plans, manages and is the final judge... Read more →

Value and the Needed Units of Measure to Make Decisions

For some reason the notion if value is a big mystery in the agile community. Many blogs, tweets, books are spent of speaking about Value as the priority in agile software development We focus on Value over cost. We produce... Read more →

Accounting for Software Development - Products or Projects

There appears to be a resurgence in the No Projects conversation, similar to the No Estimates notion that has been around for awhile. I’m going to suggest that most of the disconnects around ideas of software development ‒ from No... Read more →

Software Development Process Improvement Opportunities

When we hear about all the suggested ways to improve the effectiveness of our development effort, if we're to going work on improvements, let's go where the REAL money is. Here's the IT budget for the Federal Government. This is... Read more →

Beautiful Example of the Disconnect Between Those who Pay and Those Who Spend

Perhaps Mr. Elliott could provide answers to these questions to our clients, when he suggests that estimates are worthless. When are those working demos being sent to production so the business can start earning back their investment? How many more... Read more →

Products, Product Management, and Project Management

There are misinformed notions floating around the agile community that products and better than projects. That somehow - unspecified and unsubstantiated as usual - that projects are undesirable and focusing on products and their value - again unspecified how to... Read more →

Hunting for the #NoEstimates Snipe

#NoEstimates advocates are on a Snipe hunt that will allow them to spend their customers money without having to tell that customer - with some level of confidence - how much money will be needed and how much will likely... Read more →

Immutable Laws of Software Development

A 2013 webinar at Cyber Security & Information Systems Information Analysis Center, presented some Immutable Laws of Software Development. These are worth repeating every time there is a suggestion hat some method or another, or some new and untested idea... Read more →

The Twilight Zone Approach to Business Decision Making

When we hear about focusing on value first, delivery early and often, there is rarely any mention of the cost of that delivery. Or anything about the customers ability to accept those early and often deliveries and actually put them... Read more →

Projects versus Products

There's a common notion in some agile circles the projects aren't the right vehicle for developing products. This is usually expressed by Agile Coaches. As a business manager, applying Agile to develop products as well as delivering Operational Services based... Read more →

Why Do Projects Fail?

We all wish that there was a simple answers to this question, but there are not. Anyone suggesting there is, doesn't understand the complexities of non-trivial projects in any domain. There are enough opinions to paper the side of a... Read more →

Idiot Wind

On the way home last week from a program managers conference, was listening to Bob Dylan's Idiot Wind Everything's a little upside down, matter of fact the wheels have stopped. What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good. Idiot Wind,... Read more →

The Principles of Business Management

In business we exchange cost for value. This value is defined by the market in most cases. It can be defined by those paying if what they are buying of a purpose built piece of software. In the for Profit... Read more →

Incremental Delivery of Features May Not Be Desirable

There is a popular notion in agile that incremental delivery of Features allows the project to stop at any time and deliver value to those paying for the work. This is another concept of agile, in the absence of a... Read more →