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TL;DR Spend 80% on expensive consultants qualified in "project management method" such as PRINCE2/V-Model and make a f*g nightmare for the people who actually t

TL;DR Spend 80% on expensive consultants qualified in "project management method" such as PRINCE2/V-Model and make a f*g nightmare for the people who actually try to make it work. A picture is worth a thousand words: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Systems_Engineering_and_Verification.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Systems_...

jodrellblank 9y ago
Did you even read it? There's no mention of PRINCE2 or any recommendations in it at all
xenity7 9y ago
It seems you've been hurt recently by a consultant :). The institutional response to managing the risk of complex systems is often to introduce layers of approval and process that appear to be dealing with a problem ("this system can't fail, therefore please check with everyone involved in the system before making a change") but really have little real world value except driving everyone crazy and incurring enormous cost. They also shield individuals from real responsibility (how carefully do you review something you are the only approver on? What if there are 5 approves? What about 15?). A better answer is to find ways to conduct real world tests with subsets of your system where you can roll back bad consequences. As far as I can tell This is the approach of google/Facebook and other newer tech companies with pushing small changes to subsets of customers for testing. Legacy enterprise companies are woefully inequipped to do this for the most part, both technically and culturally. Some industries have regulations that make this approach difficult (financial services) or human consequences to failure that make the cost of experimentation too high (medicine, airlines, etc)
aaight 9y ago
"The [Apollo 17] rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some naming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare... The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA's human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab's more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the Real World, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing." - Steven Levy, Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution
JauntyHatAngle 9y ago
Funny, my thought was the opposite. Having worked in heavily bureaucratic organisations, I was reading the pdf as an allegory of the blame game and safety first heavily bureaucratic, process driven culture big orgs have, which do nothing to do actually reduce risk - rather it stifles people actually being able to, and wanting to, change anything. Basically I came away with the opposite to what you said.

jodrellblank 9y ago

Did you even read it? There's no mention of PRINCE2 or any recommendations in it at all

xenity7 9y ago

It seems you've been hurt recently by a consultant :). The institutional response to managing the risk of complex systems is often to introduce layers of approval and process that appear to be dealing with a problem ("this system can't fail, therefore please check with everyone involved in the system before making a change") but really have little real world value except driving everyone crazy and incurring enormous cost. They also shield individuals from real responsibility (how carefully do you review something you are the only approver on? What if there are 5 approves? What about 15?). A better answer is to find ways to conduct real world tests with subsets of your system where you can roll back bad consequences. As far as I can tell This is the approach of google/Facebook and other newer tech companies with pushing small changes to subsets of customers for testing. Legacy enterprise companies are woefully inequipped to do this for the most part, both technically and culturally. Some industries have regulations that make this approach difficult (financial services) or human consequences to failure that make the cost of experimentation too high (medicine, airlines, etc)

aaight 9y ago

"The [Apollo 17] rocket, which of course never could have held to so true a course without computers, leapt into the sky, hell-bent for the cosmos like some naming avenger, a Spacewar nightmare... The sight affected Gosper profoundly. Before that night, Gosper had disdained NASA's human-wave approach toward things. He had been adamant in defending the AI lab's more individualistic form of hacker elegance in programming, and in computing style in general. But now he saw how the Real World, when it got its mind made up, could have an astounding effect. NASA had not applied the Hacker Ethic, yet it had done something the lab, for all its pioneering, never could have done. Gosper realized that the ninth-floor hackers were in some sense deluding themselves, working on machines of relatively little power compared to the computers of the future yet still trying to do it all, change the world right there in the lab. And since the state of computing had not yet developed machines with the power to change the world at large certainly nothing to make your chest rumble as did the NASA operation all that the hackers wound up doing was making Tools to Make Tools. It was embarrassing." - Steven Levy, Hackers, Heroes of the Computer Revolution

JauntyHatAngle 9y ago

Funny, my thought was the opposite. Having worked in heavily bureaucratic organisations, I was reading the pdf as an allegory of the blame game and safety first heavily bureaucratic, process driven culture big orgs have, which do nothing to do actually reduce risk - rather it stifles people actually being able to, and wanting to, change anything. Basically I came away with the opposite to what you said.