Herding Cats

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 →

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 →

Project Versus Product in Agile Development

Agree, and focus more on discovery since in *delivery* you have 4 problems: 1. Requirements will change, 2. Requirements are never complete 3. It’s impossible to gather all requirements in beginning 4. You don’t have enough time or $$$ to... Read more →

An Incremental Paradigm

We were speaking at Homeland Security yesterday on Agile development in the Federal Government and there was a senior director who brought up a paradigm that resonated with me. The infrastructure for enterprise IT has a critical impact on the... Read more →

Principles of Project Success

Projects produce products, services, solutions. Projects deliver capabilities that fulfill Missions and Vision, Projects are a vehicle to accomplish and outcome. Projects collect nonrecurring costs in exchange for that produced value. Every project should have a goal, an objective, and... Read more →

Agile Project Management Methods

There is a lot of unsubstantiated claims going around about how agile should or should not be applied. How estimates are or are not needed. How the team should or should not be managed. From the point of view of... Read more →

Estimating Processes in Support of Economic Analysis

On any project with significant Value at Risk Economic Analysis provides visibility to the data needed for decision making. This Value at Risk paradigm is a critical starting point for applying all processes of decision making. The choice of decision... Read more →

The Customer Bought a Capability

Customers buy capabilities to accomplish a business goal or successfully complete a mission. Deliverables are the foundation of the ability to provide this capability. Here's how to manage a project focused on Deliverables. Deliverables Based Planning from Glen Alleman These... Read more →

Impact Mapping and Integrated Master Planning

In the literally 1,000's of pieces of correspondence I receive or send monthly, I came in contact with Impact Mapping, Gojko Adzic. At the same time I got an email from a person I met while speaking at last weeks... Read more →

Capabilities Based Planning and Development

The Death March project starts when we don't know what DONE looks like. Many of the agile approaches attempt to avoid this by exchanged not knowing for budget and time bounds. In the enterprise IT domain, those providing the money,... Read more →

Don't Start With Requirements Start With Capabilities

Lot's of myth floating around about requirements elicitation and management. Starting with requirements is not how large, complex, mission critical DOD and NASA programs work. Start with Capabilities. This cna be directly transferred to Enterprise IT. Here's a map of... Read more →

Do It Right or Do It Twice

I heard this phrase in a conference call yesterday with a DOD client and thought, how clever I'll write a blog about this. Only to find out there is a Forbes article with same name and several other articles as... Read more →

Performance-Based Project Management(sm) Released

Performance-Based Project Management(sm) on Amazon Here's the Table of Contents and Chapter 2. This chapter is the anchor for the Principles, Practices, and Processes of increasing the probability of project success. Performance-Based Project Management(sm) from Glen Alleman Here's a quick... Read more →

3 Impediments To Actual Improvement in the Presence of Dysfunction

We didn't know that our problem has been solved before We didn't do our home work and look at what others have done to improve in similar situations. We didn't look for the root cause of our problem to see... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Reality is never so tidy - Sherlock Holmes When we hear of tidy fixes to complex problems, remember Sherlock. Before deciding that any idea is viable for improving our lot in life around project success, ask if the suggested solution... Read more →

How To Create Confusion About Root Causes

The NPR story about the Affordable Care Act web site is one of those out of your domain stories. (follow picture link to story) that we see in the popular press. First is the way over generalized descriptions of Waterfall... Read more →

One of the Problems with Emergent Design

Unless we know what capabilities we need at the end of the project, and know those somewhere near the beginning of the project, have a Plan to produce those capabilities at the needed time for an anticipated budget, we're going... Read more →

Earning Value from Earned Value

There's a post on a Deltek implementation partner site about applying Earned Value. It has some good advice, but the premise of the starting point needs to be addressed. Before going on to suggest things to do on a project... Read more →

The Myth and Misunderstanding of Waterfall

The classical mistake of many agilest is to equate Waterfall with a method that is in use today. Projects @ Work (subscription required)has a discussion about Method Madness in which the classic mistake is made. “Waterfall methods are notorious for... Read more →

Integrating Cost, Schedule, and Technical Performance Measures

In the previous post, the new IPMR DID instructs us to integrate cost, schedule, and technical performance.Here's some more advice. Now the bigger question. Where is the similar advice for IT projects. Agile starts down this road, but needs a... Read more →