Herding Cats

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 →

Deconstructing the Hertz and Accenture Debacle

A recent lawsuit by Hertz Rental Car against Accenture has turned into a rallying cry by Agilest and No Estimates advocates. Of course, No Root Cause analysis has been performed by these advocates, but it makes good click bait for... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Understanding First Principles is the basis of all understanding - Dr. Kaye Remington, PGCS, Canberra Australia, 14 August 2018 Without first principles, immutable first principles actually, any suggested improvement of anything is just wishful thinking uninformed by any governance, boundary... 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 →

System of Systems and Capability Based Planning

A critical missing component of software development, especially agile software development, and even more especially agile software development is the notion of a System and a System of Systems. The majority of the literature based on traditional and agile development... 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 →

The Integrated Master Plan Defines what Done Looks Like

My colleague, Pat Barker, is an instructor at the Defense Acquisition University. Pat has produced Practical Advice for Integrated Master Plans. Click on the image below to get started. The resources there will guide you through the development and use... 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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Is There an Underlying Theory of Software Project Management?

Here's a paper that has been under constant development for several years now and is headed to a Journal and part of an upcoming book chapter. The motivation for the paper started when there were claims made the somehow agile... Read more →

Cone of Uncertainty - Revisited

We're writing two chapters in an upcoming Project Management Book, with a working title, The Gower Handbook of Project Performance for Agile, Waterfall and Everything in Between, edited by Mark Phillips. One chapter on the Principles of Risk Management and... Read more →

Biases in Project Management and How to Remove Them

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,... Read more →

Two Parallel Processes of Project Success - Both Value and Delivery are Needed

There's a popular phrase in some parts of the agile community that goes like this... We focus on value production, not delivery This willfully ignores the principle of all business decision making in the presence of uncertainty... Software development is... Read more →

Modeling the Future Using Empirical Data from the Past

This is a quote from Twitter today that says Various projective practices upon trending have been used to forecast progress ... These have proven useful. However, these do not replace the importance of empiricism. In complex environments, what will happen... Read more →

Reasons to Estimate and Measure

Estimating Software-Intensive Systems: Project, Products, and Processes, Richard D. Stutzke is a starting point for estimating software projects. From tradition projects to agile projects, this text provides practical examples based on principles. This post is derived from the book, but... Read more →

Physical Percent Complete: Knowing When You Are Done

The goal of every program manager is to have a set of practices that connect all the programmatic planning, risk, and performance information in a single unified view needed to support the decisions that increase the probability of success of... Read more →