Herding Cats

Conference Presentations, White Papers, and Journal Articles

Here's a collection of PMI and other conference presentations, white papers, and journal articles on various topics developed over the decades of managing projects and programs in a variety of domains, where arriving on pr before the needed time, at... Read more →

Compendium of Works to Increase Probability of Project Success

This collection of presentations, briefings, journal and conference papers, essays, and book content has been used to increase the Probability of Project Success (PoPS) written and applied over my career in the software-intensive system of systems and other business and... Read more →

Compendium of Blog Posts on Estimating

Estimating is a critical part of project planning, involving a quantitative estimate of project costs, resources, or duration. Here's a starting summary of Estimating Want To Learn How To Estimate? Part Troisième And blogs that speak to estimating projects in... Read more →

Resources for #PMChat Talk

I was invited to participate in the Twitter #PMCHAT session today to speak about the principles of Increasing the Probability of Project Success. The #PPChat process is based on asking questions and engaging with those providing answers. Here are the... Read more →

Quote of the Day

You can't run a credible business or your own household without knowing your basis of cost and the cost demand in the future. In the presence of reducible and irreducible uncertainties, that cost basis and the value produced or acquired... Read more →

The Economics of Strategy

It's a popular phrase in the agile community to speak about value. And to use this notion as the basis of decision making around tools, processes, and delivered software. Trouble is when we hear words like estimates provide no value,... Read more →

Epistemic and Aleatory Uncertainty Creates Risk to Project Success

There are two types of uncertainty on projects: Aleatory known as objective, stochastic, or irreducible. Epistemic known as subjective, state-of-knowledge, or reducible. Aleatory uncertainty is related to random variables. The intrinsic random nature of the phenomena occurring during the development... Read more →

How Do Projects Fail? Let Us Count the Ways

Poor initial requirements definition ― failure to start with Capabilities and only then deriving the requirements. These Capabilities are assessed in Measures of Effectiveness and Measures of Performance Poor performance and cost trade-offs during development ― with the Measures of... Read more →

Quote of the Day

I would hardly think today of making my first flight on a strange machine in a 27-mile wind . . . I look with amazement upon our audacity in attempting flights with a new and untried machine under such circumstances.... Read more →

Quote of the Day

In the space of two days, I had evolved two plans, wholly distinct, both of which were equally feasible. The point I am trying to bring out is that one does not plan and then try to make circumstances fit... Read more →

The Story Counting Fallacy Without Knowing Underlying Statistics

There's a popular meme on social media that goes ...just count the number of stories, instead of Story Points that's all you need to estimate a software development project. That's an OK idea if several things are in place. But... Read more →

Ignorance Versus "Willful Ignorance"

In a recent exchange on Twitter, I was called Ignorant for failing to understand a concept held by a self-proclaimed thought leader on the topic. Here in the US When you call someone ignorant, it's usually during, as some have... Read more →

Thought of the Day

Science is in the process and tools Art is in the people and their relationships Management Systems without tools provide partial solutions. Success means delivering what those paying for the project set out to accomplish. In the presence of uncertainty,... Read more →

Without a Road Map, We're Driving in the Dark With The Lights Off

For project success we need to know if we're on the right path to Done and we need meaningful measures of progress to the plan. We must measure the increasing maturity of the Deliverables and their Value to the customers... Read more →

Applying Project Control Processes to Agile Development Projects

Known Success Factors From Government Research For Aerospace And Defense Programs Are Augmented With Agile Development Good Practices And The Enablers Of These Good Practices. Good Practices and Enablers of Good Practices, based on a report from Comptroller and Auditor... Read more →

The Practitioner's Handbook of Project Performance

Our two chapters in The Practioner's Handbook of Project Performance: Agile, Waterfall and Beyond, edited by Mark Phillip's Routledge, 2019 is now out. Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 are principles and practices of risk management contributed by me, Tom Coonce,... Read more →

Capabilities Based Planning

Over the years, the success rate of traditional project management methods applied to software development projects has been underwhelming. These traditional methods are based on a retrospective approach that measures variance against plan rather than providing a performance–forecast that can... Read more →

What Do We Mean by Risk and Uncertainty?

Risk and Uncertainty are an integral part of all decision-making processes for non-trivial work. The decision-making process involves a set of actions and outcomes, each of which associated with them a probability or a statistical process. All risk comes from... Read more →

Quote of the Day

“The winning general is the one who can best act on imperfect information and half-formed theories.” – Napoleon Bonaparte All decisions in the presence of uncertainty require making estimates of the reducible and irreducible uncertainties that create risk. Knowing the... Read more →

Software Estimating Processes and the Fallacy of the Week

I'm continually building the bibliography for our Software Intensive Systems of Systems work activities and found in "A review of Agile Software Effort Estimation Methods" It lists Traditional Methods Expert Judgement Analogy Price-to-Win, Bottom-Up, and Top-Up Wideband Delphi Algorithmic methods... Read more →