Can Project Management survive Anarchy (aka Scrum or KanBan)

Anarchists are those who advocate the absence of the state, arguing that common sense would allow people to come together in agreement to form a functional society allowing for the participants to freely develop their own sense of morality, ethics or principled behavior. (via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy)
Question: Can Project Management survive Anarchy (aka Scrum or KanBan)?
Short answer: A good Project Manager Can

I am (always have been) very pro-Agile, especially those who adhere to the base Agile Alliance Manifesto. (http://agilemanifesto.org/). Who wouldn’t support it? I mean really support it?
Short answer: Those who feel threatened by lack of control…

In my opinion, a GOOD project manager is a person who helps in any way to ensure business value is being provided. For those who feel some form of anarchy is needed to shake off the shackles of corporate over management, I’m with them. HOWEVER, in my experiences, those who push the most to shed the chains of corporate oppression often have their own chains in the making, something to be very wary of when supporting such a movement. The best approach is to uncover the underlying drivers and realize that at the end of the day we’re all humans and we all tend to make the same decisions as those before us (in other words, people who seek freedom of choice often try to bind others to their preconceived choice).

What is this blog post about? My on-going discomfort with where Scrum, KanBan and like movements are going, more about putting a certification business model in place than actually providing a path for improvement. I always get comfort in reading Kent Beck or Ron Jefferies posts, they seem to keep to the original goal of the Agile Manifesto where others tend to seek monetization for a recycled idea with a different sounding name.

I got the Wave

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/29/google.wave.beta/index.html
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/172822/google_invites_more_testers_to_ride_wave.html

Evolutionary more then revolutionary and I think (once I get use to it) that it will set the pace and direction for other major communication tools.  I've always felt that IM and Email are basically the same, and any way to easily track communication, continue the conversation and add to it would be GREAT! Google Wave moves in the right direction.  There's potential for some information overload...but it all comes down to how people use and adopt to it.

WOW – Twit.TV/Floss Weekly with Linus Torvalds

Floss weekly hosted by Randal Schwartz and Jono Bacon is kicking up some great shows. This week’s show is an interview with Mr. Linux - Linus Torvalds. As Jono Bacon said ‘…opinionated without being an ass..’. Not a deep insightful discussion on Linux, but a GREAT discussion with a leading software developer and some of what makes him who he is. A must listen to for anyone interested in IT.

http://twit.tv/floss88

Alan Turing - hero

Thank you John Graham-Cumming for bringing Alan Turing's story to light and petitioning the government to do the right thing!

http://www.twit.tv/213

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/18/turing_pardon_campaign/

Kent Beck on FLOSS Weekly

For those of you who don’t know who Kent Beck is, well its time to learn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck. Basically he’s one of the founding fathers of the Agile movement and the person behind Extreme Programming (XP) and all that goes with it…a real IT hero.

Kent was recently featured on FLOSS Weekly a great podcast about the open source community: http://www.twit.tv/floss87. This is a must listen to show, topics range from his view on Agile, Test Driven Development (TDD) and open source…all interesting and controversial points. What really caught my attention and reenergized me was his comments about a programmers need to take responsibility and to be accountable – plain and simple, something that every developer should reflect about in regards their dealings with others. His focus was more on the soft skill arena (psychology) and how it plays into the maturing of a programmer…

Dr. StrangeFramework or how I learned to stop worrying and love the layers

Part 6 – Wrapping up
I did not cover all the layers (not even thinking about down to the linux kernel) and did not go greatly in depth into any one of them…I just wanted to provide an overview of the layers I encountered/put-in-place in the development of a prototype that may someday become the next open source project management tool. My overall feeling is that frameworks FORCE you to code in a standard way providing FREEDOM/FLEXIBILITY to focus on the product being delivered and those corners of the code where 80% of the complexity is (which sometimes needs to be handled outside of the various framework/layers). I w as happily surprised overall with my ability to decouple and with the reduced coding required to accomplish what it is I desired to do…

Dr. StrangeFramework or how I learned to stop worrying and love the layers

Part 5 – ORM
What is it? I don’t think there’s any definitive answer, but basically ORM (Object Relational Mapping) abstracts data into objects (or attempts to) – so multiple tables providing data to represent a single project is treated as a single object with in the code: project name, project tasks, project notes, etc. each stored separately in the database (RDBMS) becomes a set of related objects within the PHP code…what my hope was, was that DataMapper would provide the interface to define the data layer and then kick back a hierarchical single object (Project) that would provide methods to access the underlying related data (project notes, etc.)…well, it did make accessing and manipulating the data easier – the top-down object hope was not there (could be my misunderstanding of ORM OR the difficulty in providing it). Once again following a framework forced me to setup the various data tables in a standard format and it did handle all of the underlying SQL/DB requirements and probably reduced my code by half (at least). Without having a LARGE database, its difficult for me to say what the performance impact is…I would assume there’s some impact…but I’ll leave that to others to provide the insight on…next, wrapping up