It is clear to me that some people think an agile approach means you can willy-nilly delete things in the process. This is also true for conventional project, but I do not think for the same reasons. For conventional projects, it seems time pressures cause elimination of certain functions or processes to keep the schedule. […]

Flip a coin, heads, or tails. The probability that it will come up heads is 50%; there are only two sides.  Flip that same coin again, the same probability, 50%.  However, if we say that success is two successive heads (or tails) that is different. The probability of two consecutive heads is the product of […]

Taxonomy of Project Failure – Risks Experience suggests there are many ways to project failure due to our project management actions, this does not include the riskiness of the effort in general that comes with the uncertainty associated with projects – these are not operations.  Projects by definition have uncertain components, this is especially true […]

We have been exploring the connection between the learning organization, organization development and project management, in fact, if you visit the Learning Organization training area https://valuetransform.com/lo-od/ you will find the class that ties these concepts together with project management.   In this exploration we have reviewed some of our favorite works by Peter Senge, The […]

Schedule pressures can keep project managers up at night. Frequently the project schedule is not entirely driven by logistics from within the projects but by external pressures such as market or executive pressure.  There are metrics that can be used to help predict, sometimes these are not created, gathered, maintained or have the appropriate follow […]

Many of you who have read our blog know we are fans of the show Aircraft Disaster on the Smithsonian Channel.  We do not like the show for the disaster part, but the root-cause analysis aspects.  These things are intriguing for engineers.  Root cause analysis is an important skill for design engineers, process engineers, and […]

Not all television is not mind numbing.  I enjoy The History Channel and many other similar channels as these are not exactly learning opportunities but close.  However, my son turned us on to a show called House on Netflix[1] and it is very interesting. House (also called House, M.D.) is an American television medical drama that […]

  There are a number of challenges when developing products or systems using multiple suppliers.  My experience mirrors that of those of the Defense & Aerospace Group on LinkedIn that many systems are developed with more than one supplier, each with a sub-assembly or sub-system constituent of the entire system assigned to a multiplicity of […]