When we hear words about any topic, my favorite of course is all things project manage, it doesn't make them true.
- Earned Value is a bad idea in IT projects because it doesn't measure business value
- Turns out this is actually true. The confusion was with the word VALUE
- In Earned Value, Value is Budgeted Cost of Work Performed (BCWP) in the DOD vocabulary or Earned Value in the PMI vocabulary
- Planning is a waste
- Planning is a Strategy for the successful completion of the project
- It'd be illogical not to have a Strategy for the success of the project
- So we need a plan.
- As Ben Franklin knew "Failure to Plan, means we're Planning to Fail"
- The Backlog is a waste and grooming the Backlog is a bigger waste
- The backlog is a list of planned work to produce the value of the project
- The backlog can change and this is the "change control paradigm" for agile.
- Change control is a critical processes for all non-trivial projects
- Without change control we don't have a stable description of what "Done" looks like for the project. Without having some sense of "Done" we're on a Death March project
- Unit Testing is a waste
- Unit testing is the first step of Quality Assurance and Independent Verification and Validation
- Without UT and in the presence of a QA and IV&V process, it will be "garbage in garbage out" for the software.
- Assuming the developers can do the testing is naive at best on any non-trivial project
- Decisions can be made in the presence of uncertainty without estimates
- This violates the principles of Microeconomics
- Microeconomics is a branch of economics that studies the behavior of individuals and small impacting organizations in making decisions on the allocation of limited resources
- All projects have uncertainty - reducible and irreducible.
- This uncertainty creates risk. This risk impacts the behaviors of the project work.
- Making decisions - choices - in the presence of these uncertainties and resulting risks needs to assess some behavior that is probabilistic.
- This probabilistic behavior is driven by underlying statistical processes.
So when we hear some phrase, idea, or conjecture - ask for evidence. Ask for domain. Ask for examples. If you hear we're just exploring ask who's paying for that? Because it is likely those words are unsubstantiated conjecture from personal experience and not likely very useful outside that personal experience
