Herding Cats

Lessons Learned from the Columbia Disaster

This week I taught a 4-day course on Progressive Concepts in Program Management at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. One of the workshops used the NASA Columbia accident as an example (NASA report calls these things mishaps). This... Read more →

The Aha! of the Day

I was watching a YouTube on Why Scaling Agile Doesn't Work and How to Fix It when I had my Aha! moment about some in the Agile community that makes statements that don't make sense in my domain. I work... Read more →

Podcast Interview

On a recent flight, I met Rory Rowland. Rory is in the Missouri House of Representative, a former CEO of a Credit Union, and a consultant and author. We started talking as well traveled travelers do, sharing backgrounds and current... Read more →

Quote of the Day

The man who grasps principles can successfully handle his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles is sure to have trouble — Ralph Waldo Emerson So Just Remember ... There is no principle by which you can make... Read more →

Agile Stories are Actually Requirements

It's popular in the agile community to speak about User Stories and how they are Not requirements. As a System Engineer, here's some background on Systems Architecture and Requirements Engineering. Let's start with some background about Systems and their engineering.... Read more →

Compendium of Works to Increase Probability of Project Success

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

What's Missing from the Agile Software Development Paradigm

Agile software development is framed by a manifesto, a set of 12 principles, several methods. These are all focused on developing software, delivering that software to those paying the developers. There is a fundamental critical success factor missing from this... 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 →

Decision Analysis - Ordinal and Cardinal Measures

When we hear of the difficulties of making decisions in the presence of uncertainty, especially about software features and capabilities, there are straightforward ways to solve this problem. Decision Analysis is a principle, technique, and application to address complex decisions... Read more →

Managing in the Presence of Risk

Information technology project risk often comes from non-technical aspects of the initiative. Assessing the impact of technology on people, management systems and other initiatives is essential to assure project success. "We automate problems" This department slogan was posted on an... Read more →

Quote of the Day

"Uncertainty management is not just about managing perceived threats, opportunities, and their implications; it is about identifying and managing all the many sources of uncertainty that give rise to and shape our perceptions of threats and opportunities. It implies exploring... 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 →

Quote of the Day

No sensible decision can be made without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it might be — Isaac Asimov To make sensible decisions, in the presence of uncertainty - reducible and irreducible... Read more →

Don't Be Fooled

This is a new Category on Herding Cats that comes from my finishing of the book Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, Gary Smith. Of late I've encountered many people on the web... Read more →

Monte Carlo Simulation

Estimation is part of project management. The most important estimates for the project manager are related to time and cost. And remember you're High School Economics class - The Value of something cannot be determined alone, you need to know... Read more →

Risk Management is Project Management for Adults

Tim Lister's quote is a universal principle for the success of any project, product, or program in the presence of uncertainty. I'm finishing up the charts for a one day workshop at the Project and Program Management Symposium as well... Read more →

Software Intensive System of Systems

The domain I work in is categorized as Software Intensive System of Systems (SISoS). In this domain, we applied traditional program and project management methods for cost and schedule management at the top level. This means a Capabilities Based Plan... Read more →

Black Swans

One of the books used by a vocal No Estimates advocate is Black Swans by Nassim Taleb. This advocate continually confuses Macroeconomics of financial markets and sovereign finance with Microeconomics of software development. They are not the same, the processes... Read more →

The Fallacy of #NoEstimates

There is a Blog Video speaking the #NoEstimates that opens with the following. Let's look at the credibility of each of the statements below: Estimating can be an endemic problem in organisations these days because estimating is fundamentally guessing, yet... Read more →