Goodhart's Law states when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it. Without a Macro Economics context, the Law is...
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There's a popular notion going around the agile community that says ... we focus on Value and don't need to worry about Cost. This, of course, is a violation of the principles of Managerial Finance and Microeconomics of software development...
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A previous post, Why Johnny Can't Estimate, mentioned some resources for estimating, the principles of business and technical management that demand estimates be made to make decisions, and background on the sources of uncertainty, that create risk, that require estimating...
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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...
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There is always lots of complaining about the biases introduced into managing projects and making the estimates needed to make project decisions. In Kahnemann's Thinking Fast and Slow there are three biases. † Cognitive bias - a mistake in reasoning,...
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I do not define Time, Space, Place and Motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation, they bear to sensible objects. And...
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Five Different Decision-Making Strategies That Don't Need Estimates This is a quote from a #Noestimates presentation. Remember, all projects operate in the presence of Uncertainty. If not, it's either a de minimus project, buying things from a catelog, and assemblying...
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In physical science a first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what...
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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...
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"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...
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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...
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Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own. - Bruce Lee But do this within establish governance frameworks, principles of microeconomics of decision making and managerial finance. It's probably not your money and...
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The creation of solutions that solve actual problems depends on a critical assessment of those solutions in the context of Principles, Processes, and Practices.When critics do their job properly, the exchange of ideas can take place in a meaningful manner....
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Behavioral Economics studies the effects of psychological, social, cognitive, and emotional factors on the economic decisions of individuals and organization and the consequences of prices, returns, and resource allocation, of the impact of different kinds of behavior, in different environments...
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There's a recent post titled Four Fallacious Reasons Why We Estimate. It lists the usual suspects for why those spending the money think they don't have to estimate how much they plan to spend when they'll be done producing the...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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There's a blog post from a few years back that has resurfaced The 5 Laws of Software Estimates. It's one of those posts that's heavy on opinion and light on principles. Time to revisit this ill-informed idea on why, what,...
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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...
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