The Shrine

I started reading some project management books and I noticed all their examples are based on companies with fake names (to protect the innocent, I assume). But then if you're talking about what you did at MegaSoft, technically there's no real way to verify whether anything you said was even real. Most of these books' examples read basically like: "This method was great because it worked for MegaSoft." Beyond not even sure if it really was true, you also don't really know if it'd have failed if you gone with a traditional approach. One of the example I saw was like CEO of MegaSoft want this but soandso refused and then it turned out to be great. Well that guy could've been fired by the CEO of MegaSoft too. Or maybe the CEO was right and by defying him you just screwed your company out of potential.

I realize that project management obviously isn't just all making stuff up, but it seems like you can easily say whatever you want when you don't really know what else can happen and can't often even verify anything. If I made a new method with my name and it flopped I can say 'well if they didn't use my method the whole company could've gone bankrupt' and you can't really prove whether it'll really happen or not.

I guess that's why there's never a shortage of new ways to manage a project.

That must not be a real PM book. The only real PM books are the ones that refer to Six Sigma or PMI. Also, real books would be using real company names, because they are proud to announce that their company follows Six Sigma ideals, for example.

Don Wang wrote:I guess that's why there's never a shortage of new ways to manage a project.

There is only three ways to manage a project: Six Sigma, PMI methodology, or somebody that doesn't know what the hell s/he's doing.

You are devoid of any sense of humor. Though, I am halfway serious. The only PM books worth a damn are the ones based around Six Sigma and PMI.

Has it ever occurred to you that you're bad at it?