Herding Cats

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Why Johnny Can't Do The Math

A previous post, Why Johnny Can't Estimate, mentioned some resources for estimating, the principles of business and technical management that demand estimates be made to make decisions, and background on the sources of uncertainty, that create risk, that require estimating... Read more →

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 →

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 →

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 →

What Is Risk?

Risk is the effect of uncertainty of objectives. Uncertainty is a state or condition that involves a deficiency of information and leads to inadequate or incomplete knowledge of understanding. In the context of risk management, uncertainty exists whenever the knowledge... Read more →

Quote of the Day

An inescapable fact is that the causation of all serious harm includes multiple missed opportunities for multiple ordinary people, organizations, and groups to have prevented the harm entirely or the have greatly reduced it by doing ordinary things ordinarily well.... Read more →

Principles of Cost and Schedule Estimating

One of the 4 summary root causes of project performance failures is Unrealistic Cost and Schedule Estimates based on inadequate risk-adjusted growth models. This assessment comes from research at the Institute for Defense Analyses (www.ida.org), where I sometimes work as... Read more →

Wilo's Law and Mature Communications Processes

A popular quote in the agile community is Wilo's Law. It's one that states hey it's not my fault no one understands me, Wilo's Law says... How all human communication fails, except by accident Wilo claims human communication fails because... Read more →

Separation of Concerns and Agile Development

Here's a notion that is popular in the agile community from the @agilefant tweeter feed. This notion appears when corporate governance is not part of the conversation. The role of governance is to define the decision rights of the participants... Read more →

Cone of Uncertainty and Estimate to Complete and Estimate at Completion

In a recent twitter exchange, a formula was presented that goes like this, from the Original Post Rewriting this into algebra in LaTeX gives us Let's see if we can unpack the equation: The total uncertainty is the ratio of... Read more →

Increasing the Probability of Program Success

We're working on a White Paper for the Joint Space Cost Council which is an organization composed of government (NRO, NASA, USAF, and others) and industry representatives with an interest in space. Our topic is Increasing the Probability of Program... Read more →

Fallacy of the Day

"On spec" is open loop control on value. Project Controls are Management Actions, either preplanned to achieve the desired result, or taken as a corrective measure prompted by the monitoring process. Project controls are concerned with the metrics of the... Read more →

Integrated Master Plan - Revisited

Designing, building, testing, and deploying complex systems is fraught with risk. And as always risk comes from uncertainty. And uncertainty comes in two forms - reducible (Epistemic) and irreducible (Aleatory). Much has been written about the sources of risk and... Read more →

Fallacy of the Day

Requirements, as traditionally used, are a separation tool. To separate the "thinkers" from the "doers". In software this is a HUGE mistake! This conjecture is a fallacy. The purpose of requirements elicitation, use, and implementation of the requirement that result... Read more →

The Psychology of Human Misjudgement

I came across a paper by Charles Munger, Warren Buffet's advisor. His paper "The Psychology of Human Misjudgement." He starts his talk on the same subject with. I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't... Read more →