Herding Cats

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, 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 have been presented... 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 →

High Integrity, Fail Safe, Software Systems

I was an invited speaker at the University of Colorado, Boulder for an Advanced Embedded Systems Development graduate class. Here are the charts. Starting on Page 29, I was the Software Development Manager for the Tricon. Safe, Reliable, Available, High‒Integrity,... Read more →

Book of the Month

We generally understand a root cause as being the underlying cause of why a particular issue happens. One thing to understand about root cause analysis is it attempts to reveal the hidden causes and effects behind a particular event. In... Read more →

Quote of the Day

We are reminded by the work of Dr. W. E. Deming, the father of modern quality management, in which he demonstrated that the vast majority of quality problems are rooted in processes—ignored, flawed, or misunderstood by the worker, not in... Read more →

Process First Then Outcomes

A 12.12.18 Fast Company article speaks about outcomes resulting from process and the focus on outcomes actually reducing the probability that the outcomes will appear. I've written about this before in Process is King and Process is King Part 2.... 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 →

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 →

Quote of the Day

Mystery and Ignorance are always coexistent. Learn the truth and mystery will disappear. There are mysteries to managing in the presence of uncertainty for those who understand the principles of Risk Management of cost, schedule, and technical performance and know... Read more →

I Never Thought of It That Way

This is a new Tag for the Herding Cats blog. I've had a conversation on Twitter that started with Management installs programs to solve problems on an ad hoc basis or to move the company along instead of adjusting the... Read more →

Black Swans

One of the books used by a vocal No Estimates advocate is Black Swans by Nassim Taleb. This advocate continually confuses Macroeconomics of financial markets and sovereign finance with Microeconomics of software development. They are not the same, the processes... 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 →

INVEST, Scrum and Enterprise IT

The term INVEST is an acronym for good User Stories Independent (of all others) Negotiable (not a specific contract for features) Valuable (to the business or the project) Estimable (to a good approximation) Small (so as to fit within an... Read more →

Value, Cost and Business Decision Making

In Software Value of something is totally unrelated to Cost This is a popular fallacy in the #Noestimates advocates vocabulary. Let's look at the principles of cost, price, and value to the customer from the point of view of the... 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 →

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 →