New project management articles published on the web during the week of August 8 – 14, 2011.  We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to!  Recommended:

• Vincent McGevna is advocating for realistic schedules.  This week, he talks about why “realistic” is important, and he promises next week to write about Schedule Centered Planning.
• Bruce Benson likes an article by Phillip Armor, published in Communications of the ACM, where he coins the phrase, “optional chaos.”  Bruce says it’s about realistic schedules.  Hmmm … looks like a trend.
• After twenty years of managing projects, Geoff Crane finally took (and passed!) the PMP exam on Monday.  Here’s how he crammed for it, in one weekend.
• Elizabeth Harrin adds two more book reviews to her “Summer of Books 2011” series and an interview with Jeff Furman, author of “The Project Management Answer Book.”
• Ken Whitaker offers a streamlined (but still comprehensive) model for determining whether to fund your next Agile project.  Best section: does the project align to strategic objectives? “Not really / Sorta does / Yes.”
• Jesse Fewell warns that Agile “does not fix your problems, but rather reveals your problems in such painful clarity that you are compelled to actually address them.”
• Skip Angel wants to redefine velocity as, “The measure of how much business value was delivered by the team in a sprint.”
• Derek Heuther is working on a study tool for the PMI-ACP exam – Agile Flashcards.
• Peter Saddington addresses the question:  Can Agile software development deliver a great user experience?  The comments on this post are well worth reading.
• Jordan Bortz rants, “Scrum and Kanban are based on 30 year old concepts from Japanese business …  talking about Japan these days is like talking about the Beatles.”  Time to switch to decaf, Jordan.
• Josh Nankivel reviews Rick Valerga’s new book, “Projectegrity.”  Sounds interesting, and it’s available on the Kindle.
• Alan Norton shares the ten immutable laws of mistakes, illustrated with quotes from such luminaries as Mitch Ratcliffe and Mary Pickford.
• Tom Barnett pulls together observations on risk from Rick Funston, Paul Ormerod, the ancient Greeks, and even Donald Rumsfeld.
• Jorge Valdés Garciatorres asks, does project management make you happy?
• Ty Kiisel offers four early warning signals that a project is in trouble.
• Craig Brown has been watching YouTube videos by Dr. Russell Ackoff on systems thinking, and sure enough: he has some thoughts.
• Glen Alleman goes even further, saying that IT projects fail because of a lack of systems engineering.
• Todd Williams says Congress needs a project manager.  You’ve got my vote Todd.
• Project Shrink Bas de Baar says projects can have a mid-life crisis, where they suddenly remember why they were doing all of this in the first place (and go buy a red convertible).  And then Ali Anani replies to his post with an analogy from chemistry.  This is why we blog, people!

Enjoy!