Re: The Art of Project Management

In article <5a925c42-b4ac-43e6-b7d5-0c5857eb35ba@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Scott <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

Most of the
process rubbish I see is an attempt to replace the manager's
responsibility for building trust with rules that try to prevent
mistrust from happening - but the side-effects (lack of empowerment,
the fleeing of bright mavericks, committees and their Kafka-esque
meetings, general massacring of passion) are nearly always worse than
the problems the process was intended to solve.

I'm not sure what you're calling 'process rubbish' here, Mr Berkun... but
I've worked on few sites where programmers have told me that telecommuting
was discussed and turned down because the managers decided that without
being able to count nostrils and recta they would not be able to tell if
the work was actually getting done.

Nobody - at least nobody whose view held sway during the considerations
of telecommuting - appears to have said 'How about... 'we know the work is
getting done by the reaching of goals and milestones, just the way we do
now but without actual bodies around.'

And when the process
fails, process-mongers always blame the process and start hunting for
a new one, instead of examining their basic incompetencies as managers
or leaders of people.

Mr Berkun, sociologists have said that members of (group) will (up to a
point) protect their own at the expense of others; there's not much new
under that particular sun.

I recall reading... something, an article, an editorial, a letter to the
editor, a few decades back, written by a programming consultant about Why
He Does What He Does. He reported that shortly after he finished his
apprenticeship (2 - 5 years' worth of coding experience, give or take a
hair) his manager took him into the Corner Office and offered him a chance
to don the Mandarin's Cap and become... a Manager.

The author begged off, saying that he enjoyed writing programs and would
rather stick with being technical... and the response was a sneered
'Technical? You want to be *technical*? You don't understand...
technical people are given things by management; management gives
things... to itsself.'

The manager could not understand why anyone would not like to be Just Like
Him (a function of identification with a 'we-group'... I think Durkheim
mentioned something along these lines). The author concluded that the
culture of the organisation favored management and that he was committing
a kind of career suicide; if you are offered a chance to become a part of
management and turn it down then you might as well be asking for a
transfer to the mailroom.

The only alternative he saw that allowed him to reach middle age and do
something that he did well and loved doing was... to become a consultant,
going from site to site and cutting himself off from the identifying
lifeblood of any particular company.

'In the complex recipe of personnel ingredients that makes up Bumpfco
we value all contributions highly... but if you want to get beyond a
certain wage grade then you have to be iceberg lettuce, period.'

DD

.

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