Herding Cats

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 →

Quote of the Day

In systems thinking, increases in understanding are believed to be obtainable by expanding the systems to be understood, not by reducing them to their elements. - Russell L. Ackoff Read more →

Retrospective Coherence - What Does That Mean?

Why is the past easier to predict than the future? Retrospective Coherence is looking back in time and creating a coherent narrative around what happened. The accuracy of this narrative is suspect because the narrative can only be based on... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Our conventional modernization programs seek a 99% solution in years. Stability and counterinsurgency missions - the wars we are in - requires 75% solutions in months. The challenge is whether in our bureaucracy and in our minds these two different... Read more →

Project Management + Systems Engineering = Increased Probability of Project Success

My workshop for the Project and Program Management Symposium in Canberra this August on the topic of integrating Systems Engineering and Project Management is now complete. The charts are available to the attendees and available here Projects delivered in complex... Read more →

Systems Engineering Principles

A critically missing process in many IT projects, especially Agile development projects, are the principles of Systems Engineering. Where I work many times, Systems Engineering dominates the program. Space Flight, Embedded Systems, Software Intensive System of Systems. In these domains,... Read more →

Quote of the Day

Complex systems usually come to grief, when they do, not because they fail to accomplish their nominal purpose. Complex systems typically fail because of the unintended consequences of their design … I like to think of system engineering as being... 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 →

Decision Analysis - Ordinal and Cardinal Measures

When we hear of the difficulties of making decisions in the presence of uncertainty, especially about software features and capabilities, there are straightforward ways to solve this problem. Decision Analysis is a principle, technique, and application to address complex decisions... 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 →

Project Management of Product Development

There's a popular fallacy in the agile community of products over projects. This, of course, is based on the lack of knowledge of Managerial Finance, Systems Engineering and Product Development principles and processes. Here's a chart from an upcoming meeting... 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 →

Quote of the Day

Trust is built through effective commitments. Trust is lost through inconsistent behavior on matters of importance. If trust has been cultivated and grown over time … the project will be highly resilient to problems. - Scott Berkun, The Art 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 →

Book of the Month

Network Science addresses a topic popular in the agile community but addressed with little or no mathematical foundation. The book describes topics in network and the complexity of network from physics to computer science, engineering, economics and the social sciences,... 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 →

Product, Project, or Process ...ilities and the Systems Engineering Paradigm

During a twitter today, there was a question about what are the drivers of project success. This is the picture I provided The question was where is the Quality as a driver. Here's the answer to that Related articles Architecture... Read more →

Building the "Perfect" Schedule

I'm working on a presentation and discussion for the Joint Space Cost Council that is happening in September. Our topic is about the integration of multiple IPT (Integrated Product Teams) and how to coordinate all the work into an Integrated... Read more →

Concept of Operations

One of the root causes of project failure is the failure to apply the first principle of the five principles of project success What does done look like in units of measure meaningful to the decision maker? Those units must... Read more →