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I'm a project manager. Putting aside the possible/not possible speculation for a moment, what I hope to see in the near future is a kind of support system that

I'm a project manager. Putting aside the possible/not possible speculation for a moment, what I hope to see in the near future is a kind of support system that could evaluate work in progress, work done and other factors to better help us with risk management. Schedules are tighter than ever, deadlines are seen as life or death, penalties for delays are easily surpassing the million USD marks. So I think we need all the intelligence we can get to understand what's really going on in project and make the right decisions to minimize/eliminate risk.

omarhaneef 7y ago
I think the problem is that there isn't a higher level summary that can tell you when a piece of a project will deliver. The detail of that delay matters. To give an example: I can't say it takes 1 year to build a widget so this widget will be built in a year. It matters that Max is working on a piece of code but will be out in May and his work won't be sufficiently documented so Shannon won't be able to make enough progress on this particular bug pushing out the project two weeks. The particulars of a particular project matter all the way down.
overgard 7y ago
I’m not sure of your industry, so deadlines could be really important there, but almost every programming job i’ve had the deadlines were frequently just self imposed hysteria. Management would make a big deal, but when you dug into what the actual consequences of a missed deadline were it was usually minor. I actually think the culture of tracking everything can make things worse because when everyone is at full capacity theres zero slack for process optimization or serendipity or experimentation. Its like the more overly “busy” everyone is in a company, the more collective intelligence, empathy, and perspective is lost. It also is essentially lost on almost all management that coding is almost always a creative endeavor. After all if the thing you’re building already exists you could just buy it. Creative works are extremely hard to estimate in any meaningful way.
- delusional 7y ago
  I think what you are talking about is "Kingman's formula". It's one of the important concept in lean (or at least it is in "The pheonix project").
- ulisesrmzroche 7y ago
  Deadlines are about budgets. Do you know what happens when the company runs out of money?
  - overgard 7y ago
    Do you know what happens to deadlines when the talent evaporates because they don’t want to deal with management-by-hysteria and they leave for a place that treats them like adults?
BjoernKW 7y ago
The core issue with evaluating progress is how to actually measure progress. More often than not, progress is measured in time wasted rather than value created. Not only is it very difficult to almost impossible to estimate work items on a time scale larger than a few weeks but this also gives rise to the wrong assumption that time spent equals progress made, not to speak of the wrong incentives a time-based approach to work estimation brings about. Hence, if you want to assess work in progress and risk you need to define what the terms "progress" and "risk" actually mean for your projects first.
darepublic 7y ago
If the project managers were able to understand code it would go a long way to helping shed light on 'real progress'

omarhaneef 7y ago

I think the problem is that there isn't a higher level summary that can tell you when a piece of a project will deliver. The detail of that delay matters. To give an example: I can't say it takes 1 year to build a widget so this widget will be built in a year. It matters that Max is working on a piece of code but will be out in May and his work won't be sufficiently documented so Shannon won't be able to make enough progress on this particular bug pushing out the project two weeks. The particulars of a particular project matter all the way down.

overgard 7y ago

I’m not sure of your industry, so deadlines could be really important there, but almost every programming job i’ve had the deadlines were frequently just self imposed hysteria. Management would make a big deal, but when you dug into what the actual consequences of a missed deadline were it was usually minor. I actually think the culture of tracking everything can make things worse because when everyone is at full capacity theres zero slack for process optimization or serendipity or experimentation. Its like the more overly “busy” everyone is in a company, the more collective intelligence, empathy, and perspective is lost. It also is essentially lost on almost all management that coding is almost always a creative endeavor. After all if the thing you’re building already exists you could just buy it. Creative works are extremely hard to estimate in any meaningful way.

delusional 7y ago
I think what you are talking about is "Kingman's formula". It's one of the important concept in lean (or at least it is in "The pheonix project").
ulisesrmzroche 7y ago
Deadlines are about budgets. Do you know what happens when the company runs out of money?
- overgard 7y ago
  Do you know what happens to deadlines when the talent evaporates because they don’t want to deal with management-by-hysteria and they leave for a place that treats them like adults?

BjoernKW 7y ago

The core issue with evaluating progress is how to actually measure progress. More often than not, progress is measured in time wasted rather than value created. Not only is it very difficult to almost impossible to estimate work items on a time scale larger than a few weeks but this also gives rise to the wrong assumption that time spent equals progress made, not to speak of the wrong incentives a time-based approach to work estimation brings about. Hence, if you want to assess work in progress and risk you need to define what the terms "progress" and "risk" actually mean for your projects first.

darepublic 7y ago

If the project managers were able to understand code it would go a long way to helping shed light on 'real progress'