Herding Cats

Five Immutable Principles of Project Success (A 5 Part Series)

This series of articles provides answers to the questions asked by the five (5) immutable principles of any successful project. Answering these questions is the role of the project management team. What Does DONE Look Like? How Do We Get... 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 →

Quote of the Day

The Mastery of Risk distinguishes modern times from the past: By understanding and measuring risks and their consequences, modern humans no longer perceive the further as a whim of the Gods and thereby have been empowered to transform their world... Read more →

Increasing the Probability of Project Success (PoPS)

All project work, agile or traditional, operates in the presence of uncertainty. There are four fundamental root causes of Project or Program Failure, and their drivers that are addressed by Risk Management and the Estimating processes that go with them.... Read more →

Lessons Learned from the Columbia Disaster (Update)

This week I taught a 4-day course on Progressive Concepts in Program Management at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. One of the workshops used the NASA Columbia accident as an example (NASA report calls these things mishaps). This... Read more →

You Can Not "Control" Projects

The #NoEstimates are right you can not Control projects. All projects, no matter the domain, processes, or technology, operate in the presence of uncertainty - reducible (Epistemic) and irreducible (Aleatory). The only thing that can take place is to Manage... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Just exactly what is it we manage on projects if not risks? Project management IS risk management. The risk-aware manager can show you a substantial list of causal risks. He/she can tell you the likely cost in time or money... Read more →

The Profession of Risk Management and it's Value to Project Success

I've had an engagement on social media recently, where it was blatantly clear there is a low level of understanding of how managing in the presence of uncertainty is sorely missing in the agile development community, where the focus is... Read more →

A Compendium of Risk Management Resources

This blog page is dedicated to the resources used to manage the risk encountered on a software-intensive system of systems (SISoS) using traditional and agile development methods. Let's start with a critical understanding of the purpose of managing risk on... Read more →

Agile Development and Safety Critical Software

I grew up writing software for embedded real-time control system software world, out of graduate school working on Radar Systems, Flight Systems, Safety Systems, and Process Control Systems. I moved to enterprise business systems, then to product development, then to... Read more →

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 →

Compendium of Works to Increase Probability of Project Success

This collection of presentations, briefings, journal and conference papers, essays, 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 technical... Read more →

Risk Management is How Adults Manage Projects

In a recent exchange in social media, it was clear the notion of risk and the sources of risk, the consequences or risks and managing in the presence of risk was in very unclear, when it was conjectured, we can... Read more →

Quote of the Day

But to us, probability is the very guide to life - Bishop Joseph Butler (1756) Read more →

Quote of the Day

Expert judgment is typically the crux of cost and schedule estimates but in the spectrum of the risk management process, quantification of expert judgment is the weakest area - Fred Raymond, Acquistion Review Quarterly - Spring 199., pp. 147-154 Making... Read more →

Quote of the Day - Risk Pre-Mortem

A risk management premortem is an approach where the project manager and project stakeholders envision a future where the project has failed, and then work backward to determine the story and circumstances that could have led to the project failure... Read more →

Quote of the Day

"I wisely started with a map and made the story fit... the other way about lands one in confusions and impossibilities." — J. R. R. Tolkien When we have no map, no Product Road Map, no Integrated Master Plan, no... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Most Risk Management, starting with PMI's paradigm, is focused on what if. Instead, Risk Management must focus on If Then and work to reduce or remove the IF before focusing on the THEN. This is the Pre-Mortem paradigm of Risk... Read more →

Beyond the Risk Register

Risk Management starts with a collection of risks. Their probability of occurrence, the probability the risk will unfavorably impact the project. Then some risk handling process is needed to reduce the impact of the risk, or reduce the probability that... Read more →

Cost and Value Management for Software Development

There's a popular notion going around the agile community that says ... we focus on Value and don't need to worry about Cost. This, of course, is a violation of the principles of Managerial Finance and Microeconomics of software development... Read more →