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And how many would be from incompetence in terms of execution vs poor planning and a lack of knowledge about what's actually needed to complete the project? Fe

by CM30 2y ago

And how many would be from incompetence in terms of execution vs poor planning and a lack of knowledge about what's actually needed to complete the project? Feels like the majority of those well-known failures (the 'we spent $5 billion+ and spent 10 years on something that should have taken a few years and maybe a tenth of that budget ones) come from either management who has no idea what they want, planning that hasn't taken into account even half the obstacles the project will need to overcome, or dozens of leaders all trying to make their mark. Actual technical/work incompetence probably plays some part, but it's probably less of a matter of "people weren't honest enough about the quality of other people's work" and more of a matter of "we hired the cheapest possible team to do the work, and they weren't qualified in the slightest". Bonus points for the leader of that team being the nephew/niece/relative of some guy in charge of the project.

baazaa 2y ago
I didn't mean to imply that engineering-values only pertain to things like code-quality. Project management emerged from engineering and it was a lot better when it was done by engineers who embraced engineering-values. If you look at mid-century project management, when it was engineering-based, a lot of the focus was on things like optimising resource inputs, identify the critical path so scheduling could be done to minimise blocking, figuring out approaches to accurately calculate time and money estimates (i.e. making sure estimates were not uniformly biased towards being underestimates as that demonstrates a failure to make empirically-informed predictions). While I totally agree that nowadays most projects fail due to bad management, I'd go further and say they fail because management is HR-values based. None of the above has anything to do with kindness, or indeed social skills in general. Engineers, having systematically deprecated engineering-values, now have their projects managed by non-engineers who go around screwing things up.

by CM30 2y ago

baazaa 2y ago

I didn't mean to imply that engineering-values only pertain to things like code-quality. Project management emerged from engineering and it was a lot better when it was done by engineers who embraced engineering-values. If you look at mid-century project management, when it was engineering-based, a lot of the focus was on things like optimising resource inputs, identify the critical path so scheduling could be done to minimise blocking, figuring out approaches to accurately calculate time and money estimates (i.e. making sure estimates were not uniformly biased towards being underestimates as that demonstrates a failure to make empirically-informed predictions). While I totally agree that nowadays most projects fail due to bad management, I'd go further and say they fail because management is HR-values based. None of the above has anything to do with kindness, or indeed social skills in general. Engineers, having systematically deprecated engineering-values, now have their projects managed by non-engineers who go around screwing things up.