The Muddy Diamond Bar & Grill |
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"APL is like a diamond. It has a beautiful crystal structure; all of its parts are related in a uniform and elegant way. But if you try to extend this structure in any way - even by adding another diamond you get an ugly kludge. LISP, on the other had, is like a ball of mud. You can add any amount of mud to it and it still looks like a ball of mud." -- Joel Moses "Project management is like a muddy diamond. It looks messy, dirty, and worse than useless from the outside, and contains an elegant structure on the inside. Unfortunately, if you wash the mud off to get a good look, or to make it pretty, you expose razor-sharp facets on which you are certain to cut yourself badly." --Strata Chalup A log of pointers, practices, war stories, and miscellany, documenting the author's increasing involvement with software project management in specific, as well as project management in general.
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Tuesday, February 20, 2001
You can put yourself in the viewpoint of a product manager or consultant, and most of the 31 tips will apply to you and how you manage, interact with the teams, etc. You can put yourself in the viewpoint of the product itself, anthropomorphize it, and most of the 31 tips will apply to you and how you define yourself, what your interaction with the users is like, how to keep the basics working, and how not to fail on technicalities. As a bonus, you can put yourself in the viewpoint of someone in technical marketing or product marketing, and most of the 31 tips will apply to you and show you how to present a product and what things to care about and how to learn from mistakes. Or you could have a knee-jerk reaction and say, "This is stupid, it's not even about project management or software development!" Your choice! |