I finished a book on a recent business trip. When They Separated Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Barber, Princeton University Press, 2004.
The book defines four major categories of myth:
- Silence - what everyone is expected to know already but is not explained in so many words
- Restructuring - when there is a significant culture change at least some patterns will get restructured or reinterpreted. Successive changes will render the form of the patter un-understandable. A matter of logic becomes a matter of faith.
- Analogy - the conjecture that if any entities or phenomena bear "some" resemblance in any aspect they must be related.
- Compression - crunch information and move it to the future
Some Myths of Project Management
Myth starts when a non-literate society winnows out and compresses key information so it will fit into the human memory. There are several myths in project management operative in today's environment.
- The past has come to be seen as different in an absolute sense from the present. This myth is called the Golden Age Phenomenon or in the case of project management or software development methods the inverse of the Golden Age. "In the past things were poorly managed. In the present we have much better methods." The present provides the solution to software development and project management projects in ways the past never did.
- CMMI is a heavy weight process based on mistrust and over control. This myth is based mostly on the inexperience of those "selling" agile development process. Some of the most ardent critics of CMMI have never worked in a CMMI based business nor participated in a CMMI assessment process. They do have strong opinions about why CMMI is somehow evil without actually understanding that CMMI is a MATURITY ASSESSMENT process not a software development methodology.
- Variance based project management is the cornerstone of success. The PMBOK processes focus on the measurement and control of variance. This "paradigm" is the foundation of many project management methodologies.
