Comments on: Making projects work: is project management too complicated?

By: Diwant Vaidya

Diwant Vaidya — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:52:40 +0000

Great, I’ll set something up and ping you here.

By: Glen B. Alleman

Glen B. Alleman — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:48:28 +0000

Diwant,
I think we all assume our little piece of the world is how the rest of the world works. I know I do at times. The partner I work for runs the operational side of our business, contracts, joint ventures, government compliance. I’m amazed when we looks at some of my program management plans when I skip over those little details.

One of the better voices in construction is Hal Macomber.

I’d of course be interested in a “conversation,” in place of a debate. There are many points of view around the management of projects. I persoannly like to focus on the irreducable activities, indepdendent from any method or theological point of view. I’ve spoken about that many times in the Herding Cats Blog.

I will say up front for full disclosure, that I an agile advocate in principle and of many of the practices in the right domains. At the same time, I work in a software entensive domain, where the software flys aircraft, guides missles, controls turbines, and the like. As well, the money for these projeccts comes from public and corporate sources for the most part, so governance and oversite dominate the methods – for the right reasons.

So sure a Blog about this that will capture the issues and the cconversation sounds good to me.

By: Diwant Vaidya

Diwant Vaidya — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:24:34 +0000

@Glen You and my colleague both caught me on that one! Wow those bridges are a little more complex than I had in mind, and I think more than one software developer would make that mistake of simplifying the grass on the other side. This is actually a conversation I wanted to have, between someone in construction and someone in software development about pm. Would you be up for a friendly debate on a comment stream if I set up a blog entry solely for that purpose?

By: Glen B. Alleman

Glen B. Alleman — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:52:33 +0000

Divant,
See if this matches your concept of pounding nails into wood when you were 5.
http://bridgepros.com/projects/Hoover_Dam_Bypass_Bridge/Hoover-Outreach.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TopViewNarrows.jpg
or maybe some of these
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_suspension_bridge_spans

In fact the bridges are designed and built using iterative and incremental process. They’re not called agile, they’re called Good Engineering.

By: Glen B. Alleman

Glen B. Alleman — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:15:41 +0000

Diwant,
Actually there are 100′s of ways to build a bridge.
Pair prgramming means you have one engineer work side by side with another in the design and construction of the bridge.
I work in the heavy construction, aerospace and defense and enterprise IT program management domain.
When you remove you “toy” examples, you may find it’s a bit more complicated than you’re suggesting.
Here’s a “real” bridge being built as we speak:
http://bridgepros.com/projects/Hoover_Dam_Bypass_Bridge/
Rememeber this is “project management,” no code development.