Project management: A surefire way to kill your software product
For many years, I have observed that the quality of software produced by organizations is a decreasing function of their emphasis on project management over business value creation—that is, their obsession with predictability and efficiency over learning and adapting. Software development is fundamentally an exercise in learning , while the traditional command-and-control style of project management seeks to optimize the execution of known, repeatable processes at scale. For software development, no significant developer activity is predictable or repetitive; if it were, the developers would have automated it already. In addition, learning is essentially a nonlinear process; it involves trying things that don’t work in order to discover what does work. You might see linear progress for a while, but you don’t know what you don’t know, so there will be apparent setbacks. It is from these setbacks that one learns the truth about the system—what is r...
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