A web page asks can we use PM to (help us) write a Ph.D thesis. My question goes further - can we develop a PM system which will generate useful text when it is run. My reason for thinking this should be possible, is that the PMBOK model consists of 44 interacting processes. Even a much simpler model than this would have "general computational power", and hence could presumably be used (if someone knew how to program it) for projects such as "computer-generated Ph.D thesis".
Wouldn't we want some kind of pidgin english or programming language, to say what each process does? All a process can do is to take input (from specified inputs) process it in some way, and output it (to specified output documents). We could specify the memory, if there is one, as an input-output storage device such as a table or document.
Surely computer system developers are used to working with diagrams of interacting processes. Why have they handed this work over to be done by "project management" experts, most of whom would have no experience in implementing automated systems?
Is this "the emperor's clothes
mentioned by Hoare in his 1980 Turing Lecture?
Is this part of the deskilling of the workforce?
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This is what someone else thinks about MS Project: I found this in a blog:
In order to escape a job where the future is bleak for older programmers due to the rapid depreciation of computer programming knowledge capital, computer programmers face the need to move up to management or likely wind up as underemployed fifty-year-olds, only suitable for lower paying IT jobs like QA because they no longer know how to use the latest and supposedly greatest programming tools.
It is often suggested that the most natural next move up is into project management. But the first problem with this situation is that project management sucks too. It doesnt even deserve to have the word management in the title, because project management is akin to management as Naugahyde leather is to leather. Project planner and status reporter is the more correct title for this job. Once you take the word manager out of title, it loses a lot of its luster, doesnt it? Everyone wants to be a manager, but few would want to be a project planner and I daresay no one would want to be a status reporter. Status reporting is generally the most hated activity of anyone who endeavors to do real work.
One cant write about project management without mentioning the worst piece of software every written, Microsoft Project. Somehow, an entire project management industry has developed around this crappy program which no one can figure out how to use. (See my previous post about Microsoft Project Server and Battlestar Galactica.)
Formal project management is more of a pseudo-science than a real profession, because despite the increasing use of formal project management methods approved by the Project Management Institute (yes they have their own institute), there is no evidence that software is getting better or that fewer software projects fail today than did ten years ago when formal project management was in its infancy.
The growing popularity of project management has nothing to do with better software. Its really more designed to please senior management (the real managers who control the purse strings). Real managers, who usually dont understand anything about computer programming but who dont like the idea that they have to pay high salaries to a bunch of people from foreign countries, love the reports presented by project managers, because the reports create the illusion that progress is happening and that the money being spent on the IT project is not being wasted.
Even if the computer programmer wishes to sell his soul and enter the pseudo-scientific field of project planning and status reporting, the transition is becoming more difficult. The trend is that project management is branching off into its own discipline with its own educational requirements and certification process. Thus the experienced computer programmer will usually find that employers arent interested in having an ex-computer programmer manage a project, but rather they seek someone with PMI certification and years of experience in project management.
This trend, in which people without computer programming experience manage computer programming projects, is a result of the low prestige of computer programming. People with high prestige jobs, like surgeons, would never allow themselves to be managed by non-surgeons. In a complicated medical procedure there will be a head surgeon overseeing the surgery, and not a project manager without any medical training. Lawyers have Model Rule 5.4 which makes it unethical for non-lawyers to manage lawyers.
Obviously, the problem with the computer programming industry is that it lacks a central organization to create barriers to entry and to lobby state and local legislatures.
--(end of quote from blog)---
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@hapethere thanks for your comment.
richardmullins44 1 year ago
you tell good things
hapethere 2 years ago