PM Quote of the Day — Helen Hayes

Always aim for achievement, and forget about success. 

More on estimation principles

I saw this comment by Dennis Stevens (Dennis’s blog is here) on Glen Alleman’s post on software estimation practices (here).  His comment hit on two points that stood out. Effective estimating requires a strong understanding of variance in estimating and how to account for/govern this variance. Ditto and amen… my experience in implementing logistics optimization (I [...]

Guilt-based medicine doesn’t pay that well

In an earlier post (here), I detailed how we were referred to a “holistic” veterinary practice for some severe allergies that afflicted our Golden Retriever.   These vets not only didn’t fix our dog’s allergies — thanks again Dr. Tapp — but they even threw in a free guilt trip for my wife about putting our dog [...]

Deliverables, work packages, and the schedule

This temptation to fix a schedule and get to work is constant in enterprise IT.  It is particularly alluring for any application tied to a SOX-compliant landscape — some governance models only allow two opportunities/year to deliver – where project durations strongly suggest themselves and time is always “a-wasting”. Of course, as Glen Alleman reminds us here, starting with the [...]

PM Quote of the Day — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction. 

Compendium of Cognitive Biases

I had never seen this Wikipedia entry on cognitive biases (there’s also a good related entry on buyer decision processes here).  I’ve found that keeping these pitfalls in mind really helps one when problem solving. My personal favorites are Déformation professionnelle, Projection bias, and Self-serving bias.

Subscribing to Crossderry via e-mail

By now, the preponderance of my readers are syndicated (via newsreaders).  However, at first, most were e-mail subscribers, but now they’re only about 10 percent of the total. If you’re interested in getting Crossderry in your inbox, use the following link to sign up: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=wordpress/Kyvt&loc=en_US

PM Quote of the Day — Catherine Deneuve

Opportunities are often things you haven’t noticed the first time around. 

Surviving PMO Success: Visualizing the Process Maturity Trap

Building on a post from yesterday (here), below is a picture that I’ve used to explain how process maturity improvements can backfire on an unwary enterprise PMO.  As one’s stakeholders improve their adoption and execution of standard processes, they naturally want to innovate to meet the needs of their particular commercial and project environments.  For [...]

PM Quote of the Day — Albert Einstein

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.