Monthly Archives: May 2011

“I have never known a really successful man who deep in his heart did not understand the grind, the discipline it takes to win.” – Vince Lombardi, American Football Coach A friend sent this in an e-mail. The theme of … Continue reading →

Anything that goes with saying is something that someone will go without. Read Glen Alleman’s post on marking progress to plan. I want to focus on the “What does done look like?” part about meeting operational paramters. That the product … Continue reading →

On a software development project, he relationship between time and money can be a complex function. That is not to say it’s complicated, but often some of the numbers are imaginary.

from Arnold Kling The methodology flawed   My father always said that there were three iron laws of social science. 1. Sometimes it’s this way, and sometimes it’s that way. 2. The data are insufficient. 3. The methodology is flawed. … Continue reading →

I found a critique of Agile by Donald Patti at The Project Management Hut . I thought his comments were measured and thought out. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, for examply by Boehm and Turner. I was surprised at … Continue reading →

John Goodpasture has a post at his blog about simplicity and complexity. The story is that it is the job of the project manager (and the project team) to hide the complexity of the solution and make it appear as … Continue reading →

Never make a calculation until you know the answer. Make an estimate before every calculation, try simple physical argument, (symmetry!, invariance!, conservation!) before every derivation., guess the answer to every puzzle. Courage: no one else needs to know what the … Continue reading →

Kailasha at Eight to Late engages in some philosophy regarding the how of planning and improvisation are complementary. All I will add is two points, 1) great improvisation is performed by masters who have spent years of disciplined study mastering … Continue reading →

Ken Schwaber discusses the development team making a commitment and questions whether maybe we should rename this “forecast”. He begins with However, many Scrum Teams use the word commit as if it were a “guarantee.” This is a residue of … Continue reading →

Process improvement is about measurably improving performance. The problem is that a lot of factors can influence performance so your mileage may vary (YMMV). In other words, variation happens. Various approaches to experiments, quasi-experiments, case study analysis, and large samples … Continue reading →