Herding Cats

Without a Root Cause Analysis, No Corrective or Preventive Action is Credible - Part 1

When you hear project failure statistics, and no Root Cause for those numbers, there is no hope that any suggested corrections can be credible. As well when you hear those statistics, many times those numbers have no credibility themselves to... Read more →

Quote of the Day - Motivation

When I was reading The Manhattan Project and came across a statement that resonated with me. Dr. Vannevar Bush (George Bush senior’s father and George W. Bush’s grandfather) was assigned the role to lead the development of the atomic bomb... Read more →

Quote of the Day

If you don't know where to look, you have to look everywhere - Professor Keith Ulmer, in a Physics Saturday lecture about his work on CMS in search for the Higgs Boson. 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 →

Book of the Month

Program Management and Systems Engineering are two critical processes for the success of any product or project development endeavor. Programs are mechanisms for implementing the core strategy of an organization to maximize the value and benefits for the business, clients,... Read more →

Quote of the Day

“The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.” — Henry Havelock Ellis, British psychologist Read more →

Quote of the Day

Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature - George Benard Shaw, from Caesar and Cleopatra Read more →

Augustine's Laws

Norm Augustine was the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Martin Marietta Corporation. Here are some Laws he defined The Laws of Unbounded Enthusiasm Law I - The best way to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear is... Read more →

Quote of the Day

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." – Galileo Galilei The challenge is what is the basis of the truth. In our software-intensive system of systems domain, there are many claiming... Read more →

#NoEstimates in Six Boxes

Here's a picture from a Tweeter post (without attribution) that is suggested to represent what it means to apply #NoEstimates Let's look at the detail of each of the boxes in the context of the uncertainties encountered on all projects... Read more →

Quote of the Day

“A great systems engineer completely understands and applies the art of leadership and has the experience and scar tissue from trying to earn the badge of leader from his or her team.” - Harold Bell, NASA Headquarters Read more →

Resources for Good Project Management

Anecdotes abound of examples of Bad Project Management. Sometimes these anecdotes are used to suggest a corrective or preventive action that might actually work. Other times these suggestions are simply bogus. If those making unsubstantiated claims were to read the... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world. — Arthur Schopenhauer What does that mean? Each of us has our limits. For some, the limit is in the seeing, for others,... 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

Just because you don't understand it, does mean it isn't so – Lemony Snicket Read more →

Connecting "What" with "How" - and the Failure to Understand the Principles of Systems Engineering and Systems Management

It's been said by an agile voice that ... Progress and value delivery are not the same thing. In the end, of course, value (to someone) is important. And in the standard-for-today structure of programming for money, we divide what... Read more →

Things I Know About, Do, and Manage

If you click on the link to the right, you'll get an HTML interactive chart Things I know about and practice Read more →

The Ontological Fallacy of No Estimates

The introduction to the #NoEstimates paradigm started with This statement is an ontological fallacy. An Ontological Fallacy is a statement of being or existing with an a priori theory about the organization of some paradigm. There is no principle on... Read more →

Quote of the Day

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a... Read more →

Reading List for the Cone of Uncertainty

The Cone of Uncertainty is a useful approach to defining the expected range of uncertainty at specific stages in a project. The primary purpose of software estimation is not to predict a project’s outcome; it is to determine whether a... Read more →