Herding Cats

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 →

Capabilities Based Planning (Wright Brothers)

Capabilities Based Planning provides a description of what Done looks like in units of measure meaningful to the decision-makers. These measures include Measures of Effectiveness (MOE) - Operational measures of success that are closely related to the achievements of the... 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 →

Phrases Used for Technical Performance Measures

All project progress is measured independent of resources expended - Mr. Gary Bliss, Director Performance Assessment and Root Cause Analysis (PARCA), US Department of Defense The phrases used here are the results of research conducted on behalf of PARCA. No... Read more →

Deconstructing the Hertz and Accenture Debacle

A recent lawsuit by Hertz Rental Car against Accenture has turned into a rallying cry by Agilest and No Estimates advocates. Of course, No Root Cause analysis has been performed by these advocates, but it makes good click bait for... Read more →

Compendium of Works to Increase Probability of Project Success

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

The Integrated Master Plan Defines what Done Looks Like

My colleague, Pat Barker, is an instructor at the Defense Acquisition University. Pat has produced Practical Advice for Integrated Master Plans. Click on the image below to get started. The resources there will guide you through the development and use... 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 →

Modeling the Future is the Basis of Project Success

There's a notion going around that ... “I don’t believe you can make a model of a possible future.” This ignores the principles of predictive analytics, and the direct management actions taken to produce outcomes from those analytical models found... 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 →

Is There an Underlying Theory of Software Project Management?

Here's a paper that has been under constant development for several years now and is headed to a Journal and part of an upcoming book chapter. The motivation for the paper started when there were claims made the somehow agile... Read more →

Cone of Uncertainty - Revisited

We're writing two chapters in an upcoming Project Management Book, with a working title, The Gower Handbook of Project Performance for Agile, Waterfall and Everything in Between, edited by Mark Phillips. One chapter on the Principles of Risk Management and... Read more →

Biases in Project Management and How to Remove Them

There is always lots of complaining about the biases introduced into managing projects and making the estimates needed to make project decisions. In Kahnemann's Thinking Fast and Slow there are three biases. † Cognitive bias - a mistake in reasoning,... 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 →

Project Versus Product in Agile Development

Agree, and focus more on discovery since in *delivery* you have 4 problems: 1. Requirements will change, 2. Requirements are never complete 3. It’s impossible to gather all requirements in beginning 4. You don’t have enough time or $$$ to... Read more →

Value First, Requires Margin and Contingency

There's a popular notion in Agile that says Focus on Value. The principles of microeconomics of decision making in the presence of uncertainty mandates you make estimates of how to achieve that Value in terms of cost and schedule, those... 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 →

Cone of Uncertainty Bibliography

There seems to still be confusion about what the Cone of Uncertainty means for some in the #NoEstimates community. I work in a domain where the CoU is baked into the Integrated Program Performance Management (IPPM) processes flowed down from... 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 →