Herding Cats

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 →

Quote of the Day

While management and leadership are related and often treated as the same, their central functions are different. Managers clearly provide some leadership, and leaders obviously perform some management. However, there are unique functions performed by leaders that are not performed... Read more →

Misinterpretations of the Cone of Uncertainty

The Cone of Uncertainty is a framing assumption used to model the needed reduction in some parameter of interest in domains ranging from software development to hurricane forecasting. This extended post covers The framing assumptions of the Cone of Uncertainty.... Read more →

Agile Project Management Methods

There is a lot of unsubstantiated claims going around about how agile should or should not be applied. How estimates are or are not needed. How the team should or should not be managed. From the point of view of... Read more →

Systems Engineering

For non-trivial problems in any domain, Systems Engineering provides a starting framework for identifying problems, assessing possible solutions, implementing those solutions, measuring the performance of the efforts to deliver the solutions and the effectiveness of those solutions. Here's the collective... Read more →

Principles, Processes, and Practices of Project Success

Principles are timeless. Practices and Process are Fads. A Principle a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning. A Practice is an application or use... Read more →

Misunderstanding Making Decisions in the Presence of Uncertainty (Update Part 2)

There was a Tweet a few days ago from one of the founders of eXtreme Programming, that said... What happens if you shift focus from "accurate estimation" to "reliably shipping by a date"? This quote shows the missing concept of... Read more →

Systems, Systems Engineering, Systems Thinking

On our morning road bike ride, the conversation came around to Systems. Some of our group are like me - a techie - a few others are business people in finance and ops. The topic was what's a system and... Read more →

Systems Engineering and Software Intensive System of Systems

There was a Twitter post mentioning Russell Ackoff YouTube about systems. A system is never the sum of its parts, it's the product of their interactions. This is a good start, but it needs to produce actionable outcomes, not just... Read more →

Risk Management is How Adults Manage Projects

Risk Management is How Adults Manage Projects - Tim Lister Tim's quote offends some people. Here's a collection of his presentations. But this not really the point of this blog. I'm working two programs where Agile (Scrum and SAFe) is... Read more →

The Notion of Value in Agile Projects

The Holy Grail of all Agile discussions goes like this ... We focus on value over cost This is a mantra repeated by agilest and vendors of agile tools as well. The big question is ... What are the units... Read more →

Products, Product Management, and Project Management

There are misinformed notions floating around the agile community that products and better than projects. That somehow - unspecified and unsubstantiated as usual - that projects are undesirable and focusing on products and their value - again unspecified how to... Read more →

It's Valuable Because I Say So

In Agile development the quest for Value has become an obsession in the absence of other factors. The first missing attribute is what does it cost to produce that mythical Value. We focus on value over focusing on cost, is... Read more →

All The World's a Random Variable

All project work is random work. There are three core random variables on all projects, shown below. There are sub-variables as well as all the ...ilities involved in project work, but let's start with the major three. Fixing, 1, 2,... Read more →

Agile At Scale for Software Intensive Systems

There's a popular notion - and many times wrong - in the agile community that Agile at Scale is an anti-pattern, an oxymoron. I'm here to tell you it's not an anti-pattern, it's a different pattern. It's an important pattern... Read more →

Complex, Complexity, Complicated (Update)

The popular notion that Cynefin can be applied in the software development domain as a way of discussing the problems involved in writing software for money is missing the profession of Systems Engineering. From Wikipedia Cynefin is... The framework provides... Read more →

The Economics Of Software Development

The development of software in the presence of uncertainty is a well-developed discipline, a well developed academic topic, and a well-developed practice with numerous tools, database, and models in many different SW domains. Economics is the study of how resources... Read more →

The Myth of INVEST and Actual Systems

In agile there is a mnemonic INVEST. This term is one of those Holy Grails that is never subject to assessment within the agile community. I had a hands on experience with an agile tools vendor when we were selecting... Read more →

The Hard Headed Realism of Business Decision Making

I am rarely the person directly in charge of the business itself (CEO, CIO, CTO). Department yes (PMO, DIR) whole business no. I work for CEO's, CIO's, Program Managers, Policy Directors. What I have learned from all these leaders is... Read more →

What is a Software Intensive System?

When we hear about software development in the absence of a domain, it's difficult to have a discussion about the appropriate principles, processes, and practices of that work. Here's one paradigm that has served us well. In the Software Intensive... Read more →