Herding Cats

Project Accounting

The separation of Project Accounting from Financial Accounting is common in many firms. Finanical Acounting is the domain of the CFO or equivalent and the finance and accounting department, where payments of invoices to customers and from suppliers ae processed.... Read more →

Five Ways To Rethink Software Projects

Matt Heusser's article brings up some interesting points. Let's look to see if there are any limitations from a domain or context point of view. By domain I mean, in what taxonomy are you writing software for money. By context... Read more →

Can There Be Successful Projects With Fixed Dates, Fixed Budgets, and Promised Minimal Features?

In a recent discussion it was mentioned there is no such thing as a fixed delivery date with fixed features. This of course is not actually the case when you look at complex, high risk, high reward, software intensive programs... Read more →

Facts and Fallacies of Estimating Software Cost and Schedule

Glass's book is important in many ways, none the least of which is the fallacies of software development management that have creapt into the discussion of late around estimating. The discussions in this book are general in nature and are... Read more →

Who Owns the Bottom Line

Since Hannah is not accountable for the bottom line of her project, or for the top line, and any line in the business, she's got the perfect job. But if you're working on a project and not participating in the... Read more →

Can We Make Decisions Without Feedback?

Optimism is a disease of software development, feedback is the cure This paradigm is the basis of eXtreme Programming, Scrum, all agile development as well as the management of DOD 5000.02 ACAT1 (> $5B) programs. It is the basis of... Read more →

A Fundamental Principle In Managing Uncertainty

There is a popular myth in projects and especially software projects that prevents actionable outcomes from taking place. It is common to believe - wrongly by the way - that we can't forecast the future. It is not the project... Read more →

Ten Agile Take Aways

Today was the Webinar discussing how to integrate Agile software development processes with an ANSI-748-B validated program. In the email came the paper below. This report can be ordered at the ISBSG site. It speaks to productivity, cost, time-to-market, quality,... Read more →

Books for Cost and Schedule Forecasting

Cost is always the consideration in making decisions for systems development. How much will it cost to provide the needed capabilities? Quantifying the cost estimate and the economic risks associated with the development effort is core to any business decision... Read more →

A Decoder Ring for #NoEstimates

Chris Chapman has a nice post addressing some of the issues of #NoEstimates. This tries to explain why we should consider the approach of developing software without an estimate of the duration or cost. Let's look at these concepts in... Read more →

Predicting the Future

With the #NoEstimates topic still ringing in my ears, here's an interesting presentation from one of the supporters of this concept. It has many good concepts, one serious math error, and connects well with how we manage and work billion... Read more →

Quote of the Day

I was presenting at the College of Performance Management conference in Florida this week. The topic of credible estimating is always at the top of the list. Here's a phrase that says it all for anyone thinking twice about estimating,... Read more →

No Estimates Mean Better Estimates?

The conversation on Twitter around No Estimates #NoEstimates brings a smile. Here's some samples Marketing needs a rough idea of when alpha-level code will be available. Allowing a few weeks for alpha testing and a few more for beta testing... Read more →

No Estimates of Costs and Schedule?

There is a twitter discussion going on around Neil's post of People Need Estimates. This is a typical agile approach. No real domain or context, just a principle looking for a problem to solve. First let's establish some ground rules:... Read more →

Cost (and Schedule) Estimating Foundations

Cost estimating methods have been around for a long time. The current processes found in agile use a points system, sometimes a Fibonacci series to bin the values of the points. The challenge with this approach is the estimate in... Read more →

Probabilistic Cost and Schedule Processes

We hear all the time about how project managers can't make credible schedules or generate credible cost estimates for IT project or even other types of projects - mega project construction for example. I'd have to say Flyvbjerg is a... Read more →

Making Forecasts About Cost or Schedule

Bayesian: being, relating to, or involving statistical methods that assign probabilities or distributions to events (as rain tomorrow) or parameters (as a population mean) based on experience or best guesses before experimentation and data collection and that apply Bayes' theorem... Read more →

Measurement of Uncertainty

When we talk about measuring things in project management, there are four types of outcomes for two attributes of that measurement. The measurement can be accurate and the measurement can be precision. We want it to be both. But without... Read more →

Credible Estimating Processes

Lynda Bourne has a nice post titled Prediction is Difficult. In the end she speaks about the human failings of predicting and the difficulties of getting senior management is accept these predictions. First I'd like to suggest a change from... Read more →

The Simplest Of Ideas

The simplest answer to the question what do I need for project success, comes from one of my favorite speakers - David Walker. Mr. Walker spoke at a EVM World conference. He is the former Comptroller of the United States.... Read more →