Herding Cats

Quote of the Day

Mystery and Ignorance are always coexistent. Learn the truth and mystery will disappear. There are mysteries to managing in the presence of uncertainty for those who understand the principles of Risk Management of cost, schedule, and technical performance and know... 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 →

Cost Estimating Assessment Criteria

I'm working an Implementation Review (IR) of a major space flight vehicle, that includes Software Intensive System of Systems. Here are the guidelines for a credible cost estimate (GAO-16-620) Comprehensive Includes all life-cycle costs Defines program, reflects current schedule, technically... Read more →

Your Project Needs a Budget and Other Things

There is a notion that all you need for successful project management is a Budget. This is the notion put forth by some in the #NoEstimates community and repeated in a recent Harvard Business Review post of nearly the same... Read more →

Conveniently Unburdened by Evidence

Conveniently Unburdened by Evidence - Kate Beckett to Richard Castle When we hear a conjecture about a topic that skips over principles of business, the economics of decision making, or the mathematics of probabilistic and statistical modeling, listen to what... Read more →

Populist versus Technical View of Problems

On a Twitter discussions and email exchanges, there is a notion of populist books versus technical books used to address issues and problems encountered in our project management domains. My recent book Performance-Based Project Management® is a populist book. There... Read more →

The Failure of Open Loop Thinking

When there are charts showing an Ideal line or a chart of samples of past performance - say software delivered - in the absence of a baseline for what the performance of the work effort or duration should have been,... Read more →

The Value of Information †

Since all variables on all projects are random - cost, schedule, and delivered capabilities, in the economics of projects, the chance of being wrong and the Cost of being wrong is the expected opportunity cost. When we write software for... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation — Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749-1827) So when you hear we can't forecast the future, or estimates are evil, or we can't know what we need to do until we start doing,... Read more →

First Comes Theory, Then Comes Practice

The book Integrated Project Management and Control: First Comes Theory, Then the Practice, Mario Vanhoucke, arrived while I was on a business trip. Mario has spoken at several Earned Value Management conferences, written two other important books Measuring Time and... Read more →

Response to Consolidating #NoEstimates

Shim has posted a pro and con look at the #NoEstimates paradigm. It asks 13 questions and provides an assessment for the Pro and the Con of the statement. I'm not a fan of the notion of not using estimates... Read more →

Lean Startup, Innovation, #NoEstimates, and Minimal Viable Features

The ideas of Lean Startups, Innovation, #NoEstimates development, and Minimal Viable features are all the rage. Many times all the rage by people who have never been in a start-up, had to produce Saleable Viable Features to make the revenue... Read more →

To Stay In Business You Need to Know Both Value and Cost

I hear all the time, in agile we focus on value generation. Any viable business focuses on producing value for its products or services. Saying that is a tautology. There can be no viable business without some kind of value... Read more →

Four Critical Elements of Project Success

Four core components must be in place, have credible values, be used to make decisions, be connected to the actual performance of the project in a closed loop feedback system for the project to have any hope of success. SCHEDULE... Read more →

There is no such thing as free

When we here about writing software for money and in the same breath that this can be done without knowing the cost of that effort - fixing the cost simply transfers the uncertainty to the number of capabilities and the... Read more →

Is There Such a Thing As Making Decisions Without Knowing the Cost?

Extensive research has shown given that a current project is more than fifteen percent complete, the overrun at completion will not be less than the overrun incurred to date; and the percent overrun at completion will be greater than the... Read more →

Quote of the Day

All the project world a non-linear, non-stationary stochastic process, driven by the exchange of cost, schedule, and technical capabilities - act accordingly This means: No single point estimate can be credible in the absence of knowing the variance on that... Read more →

Some more answers to the estimating questions

Woody asks some important questions that have straight foreword answers in the software for money domain. These answers come for the business side of a software development organization. It's the business of software that needs estimates. Given a choice no... Read more →

Cost is KING, No Way Out Of It

Cost is KING is a familiar word in business. Overrun our product development cost, ROI on that development is reduced. So here's an immutable principle of all business: For a business to stay in business it must manage its costs.... Read more →

Financial Accounting Versus Project Acounting

Let's Start With End In Mind If you work on projects and get paid for that work, someone is paying for you. That can be a direct customer if you're working on a external project. Or it can be the... Read more →