Herding Cats

Increasing the Probability of Program Succes

Cost and schedule growth for any project or program is created when there are: Unrealistic technical performance expectations, Unrealistic cost and schedule estimates, Inadequate risk assessments, and Unanticipated technical issues, all based on poorly performed and ineffective risk management. Each... Read more →

Quote of the Day

We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality. —Ayn Rand Causal relationships are defined by a cause-and-effect principle. Understanding these principles creates the structure of reality where we can be responsible for our success. To... Read more →

A Solution Looking for a Problem to Solve (Part II)

When you come across a product or service and think Who wants or Needs this? What would I do with this if it were free? Why would I pay 100's if not 1,000's of dollars for this? From Solution Looking... Read more →

What Does Done Look Like?

I started using the phrase "do we know what DONE looks like?" at Rocky Flats. It was first coined by a project manager in our PMO (I was VP PMO). He started reminding me "No Glen it's not Done, it's... Read more →

Quote of the Day

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet - Joseph Jourbet a French moralist and essayist, remembered for his Pensées, published posthumously. A corollary in our software development domain might be he who has practices without principles... Read more →

A Solution Looking for a Problem To Solve

We see solutions being sold everywhere. From household cleaners to complex software management processes and tools But would you go to your favorite hardware store and buy a tool, because there was a salesman at the front door demonstrating a... Read more →

Strategies to Detect, Prevent, and Correct Causes of Project Stress and Failure

From yesterday's How to Think Like A Scientist, which spoke to encountering and countering, claims with no evidence, here's what was going to be a Master Class at PGCS 2020, but was canceled because of Covid. Hoping we'll be in... Read more →

How to Think Like a Scientist

A book in my library The Seven Secrets of How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist rings true in our time of SAR-COV-2 pandemic when I encounter not only blatant science deniers, along with the climate deniers but just the... Read more →

Quote of the Day

This is the true joy in life, the being recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish... Read more →

Making the Impossible Possible

There are many voices on how to manage projects, from traditional to agile. Here's how a large, complex, mission-critical program was managed using the principle of Heliotropic Abundance. I was a participant in the success of this project, through the... Read more →

Fallacy of the Week - Use and Misuse of Goodhart's Law

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... Read more →

Management Principles

When I worked at Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site (RFETS), for Kaiser-Hill (Joint Venture for the National Nuclear Security Agency) who was the prime contractor for $7B of nuclear weapons plant clean up (I was a VP of Program Management... Read more →

Book of the Month

In our current political turmoil, as well as project management and software development turmoil, claims are made - sometimes wild unsubstantiated claims - of how to NOT do something, how some process can fix your problems, without ever stating what... 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 →

Project Management According to Yogi Berra

There are many, almost unlimited examples of project management guidance. Here's Yogi Berra's advice Planning - You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going because you might not get there. Communicating - I didn't really... Read more →

Compendium of Resources of Mathematics for Project Management

This page is dedicated to the resources of the mathematics needed to successfully manage software-intensive systems and their related hardware and work processes when applying traditional and agile product development methods. These Books, Papers, and Thesis and other resources -... Read more →

Program Management Office Services

Just watched a webinar on Increasing Program Management Office Collaboration to Improve IT Portfolio Management from www.qsm.com. Here's a summary of how we've installed and operated Progam Management Offices in a variety of domains, from Federal Agencies to commercial firms... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Regard the engineering system as having the same criticality as that of the system being engineered. - Robert John Halligan The result of this paradigm is Process is King. If we don't have the proper process, the resulting engineered system... 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 →

Can This Really Be True?

The self-proclaimed leading voice of PM 2.0 says... Traditional project management software applications, like MS Project, were created to support the waterfall project management style and are file-based. All the data on different projects are stored in various disconnected files... Read more →