No dogma!

It’s been something like one year since I started participating in Internet communities about software project management. I’ve read tons of questions and answers on PMSE, discussions on mailing lists and so so many blog articles and books. During this year I’ve noticed kind of a pattern : to get faster results, people want off-the-peg solutions, they want ready-to-use methods that they can apply in any situation. They don’t care of the reasons why it works, they don’t mind if the solution is not as suited to their problem as they initially thought : they are happy, because the solution they have gives them the illusion that their problem is trivial : they just need to follow the dogma.

Dogmas are seducing : everything is written. You just need to follow the book, right? Follow the guru!… But wait a minute : it is pretty paradoxical, isn’t it? Every business is different, every customer is different, every project is different, every software development team is different, every stakeholder is different, every day is different, and every one of you guys, hoping for this never-ending enumeration to eventually come to a point, is different, yet there is an universal solution that works every time. Bullshit!

Of course I know that many of you readers know that managing a software project is all about complexity and balance, that you need to adjust everything on a daily basis, but still we can see, all over the Internet, people seeking for the miraculous solution. That’s why I am launching a small series of articles, for the next couple of weeks, on the topic “No dogma”.

Articles in the “No dogma” series:

4 thoughts on “No dogma!

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