BDSM style development management
Development management is a very interesting thing, it seems to be as it is, but, on the other hand, it is not there. At the same time, on this unsteady line between reality and fiction, many people earn a pretty good income, and your humble servant as well.
To be honest, the writing of this text pursued quite selfish goals: it is some kind of litmus test for sending to people with whom it is necessary to cooperate.
And, dotting all the points above i, you need to either throw yourself headlong into the abyss of passions, or finally disengage. So, a little about why there are fakapy and what they can not fix.
')
Many people, especially in the humanitarian field, greatly overestimate the positive effect that wonders of science and technology give us, which manufacturers of accounting and control systems use unhindered.
And then everyone quite seriously begins to discuss the difference between Basecamp and MS Project, write reviews, read reviews, and in general feel the importance of the moment. Especially notorious guys write their systems - I had one comrade to whom I already wrote two task management systems, and then, after a few years, he shared with me the desire to repeat this business once more.
But in fact, all these systems are designed primarily to automate the process. The last two words suggest that to use the system you need to have a process.
And the system itself does not create a process.
That is, the reason “the clock file.xls is blocked when two managers access, it is necessary to put the system in” is suitable, but “everyone is running around and hysteria, let's buy a djire to stop it” - not so much.
Although, of course, there are such reports, and tablets, and molds, that you look and see how everything will be decomposed.
Especially if there is a Gantt chart. The most cool thing is that if you are in the Gantt chart for one phase of the pro-cap, then the others automatically shift - this is a very valuable quality. Only in life, unfortunately, everything is different.
In general, the devastation in their heads. In particular, one major specialist and author of articles on project management once attempted to put a task on a yellow adhesive paper with scribbles to your humble servant, although, of course, he knows the difference between Project and Megaplan per tooth and, I think, correct me if something wrong here about Gant wrote.
On a separate line, I want to point out another goal of installing such systems: calculate the efficiency of employees in the form of a beautiful table.
As if it is not visible to the naked eye. It is always clear: this one is tight, this one is lying, this one works like a horse, this one also like a horse, but it does not work. If you have 200 people, then everything is more complicated, but these 200 people are divided into groups, and everything is also more or less clear with groups.
And in the table from 200 lines you too do not stick. There, of course, you can highlight in red the one who was sick, sowed a pass, and the carrier of some secret knowledge that the tracker simply put on your taskbar from the height of its greatness.
But that's not all. In general, a task tracker may be a goal in itself, but the goal is usually another — discipline.
Yeah, a bunch of red-eyed people are sitting, and what they are doing there is incomprehensible, and not only is it not clear, so also for a very sickly such salary.
And there is a thought that they are fakapat, sabotage, and especially notorious leftists, without ceasing to gnaw free office cookies. Therefore, it is necessary for someone to come and scarabash them all into the ram's horn. Of course, I hate programmers with all my heart, but as a rule, this is not the problem.
As a humble person, I have always believed that development and technology are secondary to his business majesty.
That is, if a business is effective and rushing, then production goes hand in hand with it.
It is not even the fact that super-profits cover production shoals. It’s rather the fact that you are strong allows you to fold away the bad and replace it with the good without fear of transaction costs - young sores heal faster.
But if you have shoals in the main process, it’s all perfectly projected into production. Not to be unfounded, I will give a couple of examples.
In this case, it is better to move immediately from theory to practice.
Nassim Taleb formulated a rather simple theorem: "The longer you have everything bad, the less likely you are to be all right."
That is, if you have been living in a refugee camp for 10 years, you are unlikely to return home to the environment (this cynical example is taken from Taleb himself - he is from Lebanon, he knows better).
So, we have some project on which all the deadlines have been spent, but here it is still a little bit and finally will be handed over.
In this case, usually at the other end (if there is one), the customer is sitting, who fairly wants to get compensation from you for the fact that you’ve all packaged up in the form of free features. Or, even steeper, in a hundred years of working the job, his business requirements have changed.
And everything from small to large decides: "Let's feed the forest monster one more virgin, you see, it chokes this time."
As a bonus:
Cut, without waiting for peritonitis, as a small trickle of you will still flow more. So you have to go to the customer (including the internal one), say: “Guys, something went wrong, let's be honest with each other” and:
Very often they try to do the work with less cost than it deserves.
In an intelligent way, this is called “process optimization”, in the people - “to make three ends”.
If you do for an external customer, he expects to receive a product, for example, for 10 rubles, and if you bring him a 3, then he rightly sends you back, and not the fact that he will not send again when you bring him what did the remaining 7.
If you decide on yourself to save money, then obviously you get a lot of buzz at the time of operation and a tasty lost profit.
A special case of this problem is the rule of one layout: the fact that steep guys show the customer only one layout does not mean that only one layout is drawn.
Evil customers and stupid managers - well-known, but not a complete list of bad guys. In fairness, it is worth remembering about the developers.
In the soul of each developer lives the dream to make your stone flower, something beautiful, cool, and what if something happens you can polish the furniture.
Since in the soul of many leaders, as I wrote above, the dream of a god out of the car lives, there is literally one step to the disastrous consequences.
As a result, we get a situation where a lot of resources are spent on something incomprehensible and beautiful, like the songs of whales: “common bus”, “super-search” or “make the module hurt”.
At the same time, this community is confidently moving in the direction of the syndrome of the last spurt.
In this case, our Frankenstein should be divided back into organs.
And further. Elegant offices, riding scooters, hookahs in the workplace - all this corrupts: in fact, a person can enjoy straight from work, he has an area in his brain called amygdala, especially for your purposes.
A little more on Basecamps.
Here, guys, we live in the 21st century, there are neural networks, there are clustering algorithms, robots play football and backgammon. Why should I fill out a hundred-field form report that looks like it was designed by dinosaurs?
In this case, you still write in Skype: "I opened the puzzle there" and "I closed the puzzle there".
There are all possibilities to simply parse messages and build reports from them. Why does no one do this?
To be honest, the writing of this text pursued quite selfish goals: it is some kind of litmus test for sending to people with whom it is necessary to cooperate.
And, dotting all the points above i, you need to either throw yourself headlong into the abyss of passions, or finally disengage. So, a little about why there are fakapy and what they can not fix.
')
Part One: Bondage
Many people, especially in the humanitarian field, greatly overestimate the positive effect that wonders of science and technology give us, which manufacturers of accounting and control systems use unhindered.
And then everyone quite seriously begins to discuss the difference between Basecamp and MS Project, write reviews, read reviews, and in general feel the importance of the moment. Especially notorious guys write their systems - I had one comrade to whom I already wrote two task management systems, and then, after a few years, he shared with me the desire to repeat this business once more.
But in fact, all these systems are designed primarily to automate the process. The last two words suggest that to use the system you need to have a process.
And the system itself does not create a process.
That is, the reason “the clock file.xls is blocked when two managers access, it is necessary to put the system in” is suitable, but “everyone is running around and hysteria, let's buy a djire to stop it” - not so much.
Although, of course, there are such reports, and tablets, and molds, that you look and see how everything will be decomposed.
Especially if there is a Gantt chart. The most cool thing is that if you are in the Gantt chart for one phase of the pro-cap, then the others automatically shift - this is a very valuable quality. Only in life, unfortunately, everything is different.
In general, the devastation in their heads. In particular, one major specialist and author of articles on project management once attempted to put a task on a yellow adhesive paper with scribbles to your humble servant, although, of course, he knows the difference between Project and Megaplan per tooth and, I think, correct me if something wrong here about Gant wrote.
On a separate line, I want to point out another goal of installing such systems: calculate the efficiency of employees in the form of a beautiful table.
As if it is not visible to the naked eye. It is always clear: this one is tight, this one is lying, this one works like a horse, this one also like a horse, but it does not work. If you have 200 people, then everything is more complicated, but these 200 people are divided into groups, and everything is also more or less clear with groups.
And in the table from 200 lines you too do not stick. There, of course, you can highlight in red the one who was sick, sowed a pass, and the carrier of some secret knowledge that the tracker simply put on your taskbar from the height of its greatness.
Discipline
But that's not all. In general, a task tracker may be a goal in itself, but the goal is usually another — discipline.
Yeah, a bunch of red-eyed people are sitting, and what they are doing there is incomprehensible, and not only is it not clear, so also for a very sickly such salary.
And there is a thought that they are fakapat, sabotage, and especially notorious leftists, without ceasing to gnaw free office cookies. Therefore, it is necessary for someone to come and scarabash them all into the ram's horn. Of course, I hate programmers with all my heart, but as a rule, this is not the problem.
As a humble person, I have always believed that development and technology are secondary to his business majesty.
That is, if a business is effective and rushing, then production goes hand in hand with it.
It is not even the fact that super-profits cover production shoals. It’s rather the fact that you are strong allows you to fold away the bad and replace it with the good without fear of transaction costs - young sores heal faster.
But if you have shoals in the main process, it’s all perfectly projected into production. Not to be unfounded, I will give a couple of examples.
Sadism
In this case, it is better to move immediately from theory to practice.
Example times: last spurt syndrome.
Nassim Taleb formulated a rather simple theorem: "The longer you have everything bad, the less likely you are to be all right."
That is, if you have been living in a refugee camp for 10 years, you are unlikely to return home to the environment (this cynical example is taken from Taleb himself - he is from Lebanon, he knows better).
So, we have some project on which all the deadlines have been spent, but here it is still a little bit and finally will be handed over.
In this case, usually at the other end (if there is one), the customer is sitting, who fairly wants to get compensation from you for the fact that you’ve all packaged up in the form of free features. Or, even steeper, in a hundred years of working the job, his business requirements have changed.
And everything from small to large decides: "Let's feed the forest monster one more virgin, you see, it chokes this time."
As a bonus:
- All project developers cry: "Anything, but not this."
- The code made on the last gasp is not tested, everything is buggy, the customer is angry and thinks that you now owe him exactly, as the land to a collective farm.
- All movements on the last spurt are not taken into account, because of this, the feeling is created that someone is underworking.
- You are unplanned to distract people from healthy projects, as a result of which they also move into the phase of the last spurt.
Cut, without waiting for peritonitis, as a small trickle of you will still flow more. So you have to go to the customer (including the internal one), say: “Guys, something went wrong, let's be honest with each other” and:
- Close the project right now.
- Split into two stages, one close now, lay out the product, and after a couple of months formulate requirements for the second stage based on the history of operation.
- Close right now and give the customer buns. And the buns should be cheap for you, and the client should ideally also get hooked on them: SEO, SMM, drawing banners, an application for social networks - anything with a large “reset” button.
- Do not spend on the project the moral and physical strength of the leading specialists, because they allegedly quickly complete everything: let the slaves suffer, at the same time they will figure out exactly how your projects are going.
Example Two: Low Blood Syndrome
Very often they try to do the work with less cost than it deserves.
In an intelligent way, this is called “process optimization”, in the people - “to make three ends”.
If you do for an external customer, he expects to receive a product, for example, for 10 rubles, and if you bring him a 3, then he rightly sends you back, and not the fact that he will not send again when you bring him what did the remaining 7.
If you decide on yourself to save money, then obviously you get a lot of buzz at the time of operation and a tasty lost profit.
A special case of this problem is the rule of one layout: the fact that steep guys show the customer only one layout does not mean that only one layout is drawn.
Masochism
Evil customers and stupid managers - well-known, but not a complete list of bad guys. In fairness, it is worth remembering about the developers.
In the soul of each developer lives the dream to make your stone flower, something beautiful, cool, and what if something happens you can polish the furniture.
Since in the soul of many leaders, as I wrote above, the dream of a god out of the car lives, there is literally one step to the disastrous consequences.
As a result, we get a situation where a lot of resources are spent on something incomprehensible and beautiful, like the songs of whales: “common bus”, “super-search” or “make the module hurt”.
At the same time, this community is confidently moving in the direction of the syndrome of the last spurt.
In this case, our Frankenstein should be divided back into organs.
- Select the parts of the system, the functionality of which can be described in one sentence.
- We make a small working thing ™ from the selected part and implement it into the current functionality.
- We look, what things have come in handy and collect Frankenstein from them less.
And further. Elegant offices, riding scooters, hookahs in the workplace - all this corrupts: in fact, a person can enjoy straight from work, he has an area in his brain called amygdala, especially for your purposes.
PS
A little more on Basecamps.
Here, guys, we live in the 21st century, there are neural networks, there are clustering algorithms, robots play football and backgammon. Why should I fill out a hundred-field form report that looks like it was designed by dinosaurs?
In this case, you still write in Skype: "I opened the puzzle there" and "I closed the puzzle there".
There are all possibilities to simply parse messages and build reports from them. Why does no one do this?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/131414/
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