Herding Cats

A Compendium of Works to Increase the Probability of Project Success

Here's a collection of presentations, briefings, journal papers and articles, white papers, and essays, used to increase the Probability of Project Success (PoPS) I've written and applied over my career in the software-intensive system of systems domain. These materials have... Read more →

3 Questions That Must Be Asked at Every Project Management Meeting

I came across a post on Twitter that led me to the blog post 3 Questions You Need to Ask at Your Next Meeting. Please subscribe to their newsletter The three questions are the foundation for any meeting, but they're... Read more →

Summary of Capabilities Based Planning

There have been some recent posts about managing scope, defining needed Features, determining how to release software to stakeholders - in both traditional and agile processes. While most are good ideas and are necessary, they are NOT Sufficient for project... Read more →

Quote of the Day

"Would you tell me, please which way I ought to go from here? 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. 'I don't much care,' said Alice. 'Then it doesn't matter which way... Read more →

The CIO's Contribution to Project Failure

IT project failure starts with demanding the project maintain its budget and delivery times in the absence of a Plan to go along with the Schedule of the work. Failure starts with the lack of an adequate description of what... Read more →

Modeling the Future is the Basis of Project Success

There's a notion going around that ... “I don’t believe you can make a model of a possible future.” This ignores the principles of predictive analytics, and the direct management actions taken to produce outcomes from those analytical models found... Read more →

Connecting "What" with "How" - and the Failure to Understand the Principles of Systems Engineering and Systems Management

It's been said by an agile voice that ... Progress and value delivery are not the same thing. In the end, of course, value (to someone) is important. And in the standard-for-today structure of programming for money, we divide what... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Capabilities Based Planning is Planning, under uncertainty, to provide capabilities suitable for a wide range of modern-day challenges and circumstances while working within an economic framework that necessitates choice. This process requires making estimates of cost, schedule, and technical performance... Read more →

Microeconomics and Risk Management in Decision Making for Software Development

Economics is a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics is the study of how people make decisions in resource-limited situations. Economics has two basis branches: Macroeconomics is... Read more →

Physical Percent Complete: Knowing When You Are Done

The goal of every program manager is to have a set of practices that connect all the programmatic planning, risk, and performance information in a single unified view needed to support the decisions that increase the probability of success of... Read more →

Quote of the Day

A goal without a Plan is just a Wish - Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944) Plans are strategies, strategies are a hypothesis, a hypothesis requires tests to assess their validity. Without a Plan, you have no means of knowing what Done... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Trust is built through effective commitments. Trust is lost through inconsistent behavior on matters of importance. If trust has been cultivated and grown over time … the project will be highly resilient to problems. - Scott Berkun, The Art of... Read more →

Separation of Concerns and Agile Development

Here's a notion that is popular in the agile community from the @agilefant tweeter feed. This notion appears when corporate governance is not part of the conversation. The role of governance is to define the decision rights of the participants... Read more →

Cone of Uncertainty and Estimate to Complete and Estimate at Completion

In a recent twitter exchange, a formula was presented that goes like this, from the Original Post Rewriting this into algebra in LaTeX gives us Let's see if we can unpack the equation: The total uncertainty is the ratio of... Read more →

Increasing the Probability of Program Success

We're working on a White Paper for the Joint Space Cost Council which is an organization composed of government (NRO, NASA, USAF, and others) and industry representatives with an interest in space. Our topic is Increasing the Probability of Program... Read more →

Fallacy of the Day

"On spec" is open loop control on value. Project Controls are Management Actions, either preplanned to achieve the desired result, or taken as a corrective measure prompted by the monitoring process. Project controls are concerned with the metrics of the... Read more →

Integrated Master Plan - Revisited

Designing, building, testing, and deploying complex systems is fraught with risk. And as always risk comes from uncertainty. And uncertainty comes in two forms - reducible (Epistemic) and irreducible (Aleatory). Much has been written about the sources of risk and... Read more →

Fallacy of the Day

Requirements, as traditionally used, are a separation tool. To separate the "thinkers" from the "doers". In software this is a HUGE mistake! This conjecture is a fallacy. The purpose of requirements elicitation, use, and implementation of the requirement that result... Read more →

Nothing Happens Without A Reason

When we see things happen, we attribute them to a reason. Not just basic observations in life, but observations on projects, and all the way down to the basics of ontology. If we observe certain things and those things behave... Read more →

More Reuse of Established Terms to Mean New Things

The #NoEstimates Manifesto - Actually restates Best Practice for estimating and making decisions with those estimates. Probabilistic Over Deterministic All project work is uncertain Uncertainty comes in only two forms Aleatory (Irreducible) - statistical variations, which can only be handled... Read more →