Great article about the expected, yet unaccounted-for things that impact project schedules - vacations, sick time, productivity levels, etc.  An occasional must-read reminder of the things to think about. 

Chris Hawkins definitely has a handle on the real world

Solid explanation of the principals behind, definition of, and ways to create and apply PERT estimates for project planning.

More great real-world insight from Chris Hawkins about the mistakes you can make when estimating a project.  Touches on quality and source of estimates, requirements, unrealistic expectations of design and debug time, and properly sizing the scope of a release.

Defines a timebox, stressing the inclusion of "quality" as a deliverable - in contrast to the iron-triangle model, where "quality" is a qualifier.  Shows how to manage timeboxes when you make estimation mistakes or otherwise need to update the plan due to external changes.

CMMI is the initialism for Capability Maturity Model Integration.

CMMI is a numeric scale used to “rate” the maturity of a software development process or team. Maturity can be thought of like enlightenment. An immature process is not much different from the old “infinite monkeys” yarn - maybe we get it right, but probably not. A fully matured or enlightened process not only does it right, but improves itself over time.

“What CMMI level should we use?” is not the right question, but it is the question most people ask.

The CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) of a software development process is the measure of that process’s capability. The goal of the measurement is to provide an assessment of the capability of a process with respect to creating software.

Advice about making sure that release dates are not set arbitrarily, but rather, have associated compelling events.

Very insightful and fun view of how software is made - and how that process has evolved over time.  Great images, great way to explain to "other folks" how software gets created.

As business evolves into the 21st Century, and as your career as a project worker develops the complexity of the environment escalates and so does the scale of projects you work on and the potential costs of failure. So risk management becomes more and more crucial to managing better projects. Over the next half dozen projects I am going to post a Risk management 101 series of articles running through the key areas of project risk management:

Raising a risk

Risk management systems

Describing a risk

Assess a risk

Manage a risk

Monitor a risk Read more at Better Projects Blog

Tips on things to do before during and after a meeting to make it more effective.