[Sussex] one for the contractors...

[Geoff Teale]

Steve wrote:
------------
>  
> 2.  If you think they don't listen to contractors they listen to their
>      experenced permanent staff even less.
> 
> 6 & 10 are in conflict.  The truth is that they promote someone to a PM
> because their experienced PMs are saying that it can't be done where as that 
> unexperienced PM wanna-be is saying that he can get the project for done
> for the current cost estimates and time scale.

I second that.

Quite often project managers are given an impossible task and told to
make it happen.  This is apparently "motivational" - personally I find
it depressing and stupid.  

People who consistently stand up and say "this isn't realistic" often
end up with a P45 in hand or put under so much strain that they look for
work elsewhere.

"Yes" men last until their project inevitably misses the deadline, some
companies will let a PM go through three or four failed deadlines before
really getting at them.  By this point the PM has either become
tarnished enough to stop saying yes, or she/he will turn into a
slave-master and start whipping on the developers to work longer hours
(which as we all now, works fine in one off, short bursts, but
ultimately result in tired, ineffective developers).

One of the big reasons I wanted to come to Cmed / Thirdphase  (other
than the lure of Linux) was that we don't really do that.  We use XP
(eXtreme Programming, not that Microsoft cruft..) (not all of it, but
most of it) and work in short iterations between releasable code.  We
can give live feedback as to what will and won't get done, and we push
the prioritisation decision higher up the company.  Hopefully this gives
people in the position to make decisions a better idea of the
_realities_ of software development.

I'm not claiming it's perfect.  We still have to deal with people who
see what the business wants (although they always refer to this as
business _needs_) and won't accept that it isn't possible, but we fight
our corner and we still have a more enlightened atmosphere than anywhere
else I've worked.

-- 
GJT 
gteale at cmedltd.com 
-- 
At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly
contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how
bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical
scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed
from deep nonsense. Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to
understand the world, but there is a built-in error-correcting
mechanism: The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical
thinking together keeps the field on track. -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art
of Baloney Detection"