The software industry has been in existence for around 60 years.
That was when the foundational ideas of Alan Turing and the genius of John von
Neumann were turned into practical usage. Project management has been around
for millennia, the Pyramids didn't build themselves. But in it's modern
recognition as a separate profession it is also about the same age. Similarly
modern business management became a teachable subject around the same time.
Yet the three practices do not co-exist in harmony. You would think
that after all this time that they would have worked out how to relate to one
another, understand each other's needs, and develop common series of practices:
Construction has, movie production has, automobile manufacture has. Software?
Not really.
Software has developed many astounding applications and enabled
devices that where in the realm of SciFi a decade or so ago. Yet the number of
projects, large and small, that fail is high. The UK has been trying to create
an integrated system for it's healthcare system for decades. Best minds
employed, big budgets, etc and it's been one failure after another.
You could argue that it is only the big complex systems that
fail, but ask any internal IT department about the success rate of their
projects and you'll get a deluge of horror stories. A lot of companies have
trouble consistently delivering $50K projects on time and on budget.
Even if the project and software teams have a methodology they
have a hard time of explaining their process to their business management.
Software projects may be moving to a more flexible iterative process and yet
their executive management is still wedded to point in time solutions.
"How are you tracking to your milestones?", is a common question.
Explanations of the new approach elicit nods of understanding, followed by a repeat of the same question.
Executives are not educated to handle uncertainty. They are
trained to expect firm dates and to track to them. Their "profession"
lacks the intellectual honesty to admit that they cannot predict outcomes. They
expect, no demand, definite dates and expect everyone to stand by their initial
estimates, no matter how circumstances change. They are in a state of
intellectual denial, in an intellectual void.
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