I suspect that my nephews (ages 16 and 10) may never regularly report to a physical office.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Geez.

“Don’t come to work early, don’t bother to stay late”.

I can see why they have generally declining fortunes as a business. You don’t make it ahead as a company by making sure all your employees are 9-5 clock-punching zombies that ought to be government workers instead.

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1) Interesting that multiple people thought of John Scully — I had not read the comments further before posting that.

2) I’m also put in mind of a friend’s tale of going to the initial M$ Visual Basic rollout developer’s conference, back in the early-mid 90s. While at the conference, he got to meet the head honcho in charge of the project — not some mid-level guy but THE Guy In Charge. In passing, the friend casually used the term “BNF Grammar“. It quickly became clear that this guy had no clue what the term meant. Now, I don’t know what they teach in IS classes these days but back then anyone who was taking a degree in CIS took at least an introductory course in compilers, which absolutely certainly would have gone over the concept. Some quiet asking around and my friend found out that the bozo Idiot-In-Chief was a clueless marketdroid with no knowledge of computers at all. … and from this we begin to grasp some of the utter cretinisms associated with M$ software.

LOL, did you read down further to entry #8 (they are numbered to decrease downwards, not upwards)

The entire reason why Apple lost out to M$ and the IBM PC is because he was too ignorant of computing to understand the marketplace, and why the imbecilic Gallic arrogance of Jean-Louis Gassee was blatantly wrong. Jobs has brought the company back from the brink but they’re still somewhat of a niche market and, even there, only by basically becoming a Wintel compatible box.

For a better understanding, there’s the excellent Wired Article from a decade back:

They Coulda Been A Contender

Generally, most PM concepts are common sense and solid organization, and are practical and helpful to possess.

I mainly got my certification because I was tired of people who HAD the certification telling me that I wasn’t qualified. I didn’t receive any special insight from the training for it.

Funny on PMBOK. I have a PM help site (www.certificationhelp.net) and used to put it up there way back in the early days of the web and they sent me a cease and desist letter. It was very polite, though.

But I don’t have my PMP, and I have zero incentive to get it as long as I am with my current employer, who has made it plain that I am no more or less likely to be laid off, promoted, or given a raise based on that credential.

[Sidebar: This is not due to any real freedom from credentialism on their part; it has a lot more to do with 1) the many people whose training and certification they paid for about a decade ago, a large portion of whom promptly moved on to greener pastures or even started their own businesses, and of course 2) their generally declining fortunes, currently expressed by such policies as no HVAC in the main campus buildings after 6 PM or before 7 AM, no corporate travel without VP-level approval, almost no purchases of office supplies, and consolidation of employees into fewer buildings so that they can lease part of the campus out to other employers.]

Back on point — Seeing Like A State seems apposite. There will always be a tension between abstract, schematized knowledge and more local, “partisan” knowledge. PMI is something of a racket, and I suspect that many of the key concepts it promotes were originally developed to take the heat off of beltway bandits in the wake of godawful cost overruns on military projects.

On the other hand, I (perhaps naively) view PMI and the PMBOK as a way of vectoring Anglospheric values into developing nations. To that extent, it may be a very good thing.

Incidentally, Harold Kerzner, one of the gurus of the field, thinks recessions are good things — the longer and deeper, the better — because they force rapid methodological improvements. I attended a talk he gave a few years ago where he explicitly expressed a wish for a recession that lasted decades. He ought to be feeling great these days.

Finally, the older I get, the less technical I am, so I’m part of the problem. My saving virtue, unless it’s my ultimate hypocrisy, is that I despise credentialism. I will not hide behind an acronym following my name.

I expect one thing that Alan Mulally has discovered in his transition from Boeing to Ford is that selling through a network of independent franchisees is very, very different from selling through a company-controlled sales force.

PM’s without any specific technical domain knowledge or industry experience, or experience that is super-relevant to a changing industry (i.e. if you are going from a regulated utility to an unregulated market), then you likely aren’t going to be as successful as someone who is a PM WITH those skills, as well. That is the SURPRISE part.

Good PM’s who are excellent in communications should at least be able to figure enough buzz-words to get their foot in the door and go on a crash course (at night) to learn enough to not sink immediately – in the long term, there are no good PM’s that don’t have a pretty solid basis at least in their industry and enough technical knowledge to be dangerous when talking. This is just my 2 cents.

(sorry. must.avoid.cynicism)

The majority of engineers I come across view the PM concepts (design, specifications, execution, and change management) as useless activities. Then again, they end up spending a lot more time and capital correcting features that should have been defined during the design phase, or worst, giving the client a useless and unwanted system/ process.

Works in theory but in reality the clash of egos might make it difficult.

It is often a good idea to go outside of the industry to get a fresh perspective on things. Industries can get so inbred that they often cannot break out of the way things have always been done. Defense is one that comes to mind. Defense contractors can become so focused on knowledge of compliance with arcane DOD requirements that they begin to think that experience with DOD regs is more important than operational execution skill. In fact, it is often a lot easier for a good engineering project manager from another industry to pick up the DOD requirements than it is for an old school weapons system engineer to learn how to more effectively bring a new system to market. The better defense contractors routinely look outside of their industry to keep this from happening.

The automotive industry is largely a victim of failure to do this. Compared to other manufacturing sectors, automotive is very average in their execution, yet it is almost impossible to find a want ad for an automotive position that does not require prior automotive experience. They are so internally focused that learning from similar, but different industries rarely happens. Bringing Mulally into Ford from Boeing (admitedly not for project management) has been a successful exception to this thinking. Their big project management area is new product development, and automotive can use all the help it can get from consumer products manufacturing, which routinely brings products to market much more effectively than automotive. GM, for instance, could learn quite a bit from Apple about the methodology of managing cost, quality and speed to market.

Just a curiosity: We were waiting at a station (still being constructed) on the Tibetan Plateau for another train to pass so we could resume testing. They were tiling the platform. There were four men laying the tiles (smoothing the sand, and tapping the tile carefully into place), there was a man inspecting the work as it was being done, and there were the labourers bringing the tiles and sand from the trucks, in wheelbarrows. The later were all women.

I also wrote about Scully in a post not too long ago…

I agree on the search engine issue for jobs – it is a bad game – you just need to figure out what words they are looking for and beat them to the punch.

If you are good, once you get your foot in the door, you will shine.