Simultaneous work and an Agile Approach There are ways to divide the work up using an agile approach.  This can get complicated for distributed teams but for teams that are on the same site the challenge is greatly reduced. We once worked on an embedded development project for an electronic control unit on a vehicle. […]

Recently I was talking with a company that has achieved the level 3 (defined) CMMI from the Software Engineering Institute that provides a measure of an organizations maturity and capability.  During this conversation, I had a flash to another company that had aspirations of being a level 3 but could never make it beyond their […]

Risks and Risk Management We continue with our series on the taxonomy of failures in project knowledge areas  looking at risk management. In this case turning our breakdown of the project failures toward risk management.  Risk management is fundamental to project management as we reduce or navigate the potential impediments to the success of our […]

  Why Statistics and Control Are Important to the Project Manager More from the TQM and Project Management [1] One of the purposes of statistical analysis lies in its ability to discern random variation from non-random (or “controllable”) variation. Random variation is extremely difficult to control, although we have seen situations where variance could be […]

Below is an excerpt from our book, Total Quality Management for Project Management[1] Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot […]

There are limits to the decomposition, and for conventional projects where monitoring may be less routine (meaning not every day), it is in our best interest to decompose as far as possible to make answering any question about the status simple, yes or no rather than some vague estimate of completion (30% complete based upon […]

We take a brief turn from our previous agile posting and divert to Total Quality Management tools applied to conventional Project Management with an excerpt from our book by that title. Consider our company has outsourced a significant portion of our project to a supplier, and in our evaluation of the risks via our Risk […]

Product development work has variation brought on by the product, as well as the organization.  Though there are many approaches out there, prescriptions that are based upon the type of organization or the type of product.  These approaches may have some relevance but ultimately things are not so easy to allow a prescription, “take two […]