eManagr News

Today is the day that the United States (with some notable exceptions) suggests that the Italian-Americans put their Old World heritage before their country by celebrating a man who may have been Portuguese or Greek, rather than Italy’s Genoa, and refused to believe the place he found on behalf of Castile (part of Spain) was anyplace other than India.

I point this out because in management and scheduling, we often

Confuse which stakeholders are most important to a project

In priority-based scheduling (need I bother plugging eManagr, at this point?), this is extremely important.  If you insist on giving your programmers or your boss more of a say than the client who pays the bills, the project is a failure.  Microsoft has a formal development process that is otherwise unremarkable except for the idea that everybody’s job is to sell the product, from the salesman to the CEO to the worker bees to the poor guy who unclogs the toilet.

Meanwhile, Columbus may have had entirely other motivations than fame and fortune for his clients.

Deal with technologies and rules that only make sense or are fully useful when we know their true, obscured origins

When you see strange requirements or can’t understand what a tool does, always ask.  Often, you’ll find that a requirement is easier to implement once it’s in context and isn’t being followed blindly.  For example, I once worked on a project where the client insisted on being able to change the size of any text.  Why?  A previous software vendor delivered tiny boxes on the screen with enormous amounts of text.  We solved the problem with pop-up screens instead, which were more readable.

Stumble on useful information, but refuse to share it because the route we took to find it exposes ignorance or an error in our judgement

Often, we begin working on a project and, in doing so, find amazing tools and data sources that could help…only to realize that we’ve misinterpreted the project.  In the scramble to get back on track, evidence of the mistaken trail gets covered so as not to distract us or make us look bad.

That’s understandable, of course, but extremely wrong-headed.  For  Columbus, it meant being unable to give a return on his investment, since the Carribbean natives aren’t exactly known for their precious metals and spices…though they have fixed the spice problem.

Find that the people who did the real work miss the accolades and rewards in favor of some bozo with a better press agent

Such is life, really.  Columbus was several centuries too late to be the first European in the Americas.  He wasn’t the first then-modern European to set foot on either continent.  Contrary to popular myth, everybody who cared knew the world was round, and Columbus’s only contribution was to underestimate the size.  And disease.  He and his men spread plenty of disease on landing and mixing with the natives.

And yet, he has the day of celebration.

It happens in every organization.  There isn’t much you can do about that, except to make sure that you credit your own star players whenever you have the opportunity to talk them up.  Eventually, someone will notice.

For example, in most of Latin America, the day is Día de la Raza, the Day of the (Hispanic) Race, celebrating and remembering the (sometimes brutal, granted) combination of the Spanish people and the Native Americans.

So let’s celebrate Columbus Day by refusing to let our teams make the same mistakes.  Some people may find it an acceptable ending to the story, but I’d just as soon avoid spending my dying days decrepitdly writing of apocalypses.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 12:00 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.