Herding Cats

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 →

Building the "Perfect" Schedule

I'm working on a presentation and discussion for the Joint Space Cost Council that is happening in September. Our topic is about the integration of multiple IPT (Integrated Product Teams) and how to coordinate all the work into an Integrated... Read more →

Concept of Operations

In the agile community, there is always some comment or opinion about how hard it is to define what the requirements are. How we can't possibly estimate the work since all the work is emergent. If this were the case... Read more →

From Mission Capabilities to Done

No matter the project domain or the technical development method, project success is dependent on knowing what Done looks like in units of measure meaningful to the decision maker. These measures are: Measures of Effectiveness (MOE) – are the operational... Read more →

Risk Management in Five Easy Pieces, with Apologies to Jack

Managing Cost, Schedule, & Technical Performance Risk Is The Basis Of Good Project Management. Risk management is essential to the success of any significant project. Certain information about key project cost, performance, and schedule attributes are often unknown until the... Read more →

GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide Applied to Agile

The GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide has 12 steps. These describe the increasing maturity of the project's artifacts. They are not specific to Agile Software Development. But here's how they are connected They are not specific to Agile Software... Read more →

Capabilities Release or Cadence Release

Business runs on deadlines and milestones for a simple reason - Time is Money Those paying for the development of a product or service have an expectation that they will get the value from their investment on some date in... Read more →

Misinterpretations of the Cone of Uncertainty

The Cone of Uncertainty is a framing assumption used to model the needed reduction in some parameter of interest in domains ranging from software development to hurricane forecasting. This extended post covers The framing assumptions of the Cone of Uncertainty.... Read more →

Decisions Without Estimates?

There is a posted question at an agile conference. Can you make a decision without an estimate? Like many discussions in the domain of agile, the statement is made without any evidence that it is true, nor can even be... Read more →

Performance-Based Project Management®

Successfully managing projects, no matter the domain, the size, the development or engineering method starts with a set of Principles, Practices, and Processes. Here are those Principles and Practices. The Principles are Immutable. The Practices are universal. The Processes need... Read more →