Project Management
Participants
- Joe Corneli
- Gorka Puente
- Frank Dengler
- Adenar Aguiar
- Cliff Lampe
- Bastien Guerry
We talked about a few different models of projects:
- the scale-invariant pyramid of sand
- the messy mob going in some direction with a lot of internal strife (possibly unvoiced)
- the branching distributed collaboration structure
We also talked about some historical illusions:
- the ever-widening spiral of iterative design
(more likely to be replaced by a spiral that widens for a while and then narrows down: the end of a project)
We talked about how a project has inputs and outputs,
and perhaps a sort of "hierarchy of needs" --
when you are able to hire someone to replace some of your function, for example, part of the hierarchy of needs has been met.
We talked about negotiation to secure some of the needed inputs (or to effect some of the transformative processes): "value", or being "easy to sell" or "easy to repurpose" can feed new resources into the project.
We talked about the different "shapes" of projects in different contexts: academic, for-profit, nonprofit, geeky, non-geeky...
We talked about "conservation of effort" and "why groupware fails"; also about how it would be nice to have a tool to understand workflow (!). We wondered when and how it can be useful to uncouple "tasks" from communication; and about paradigms of "management" versus paradigms of "control".
Finally we wondered how best to get an "overall perspective", looking at social aspects of things, at forking/branching that works or fails — versus "abandoning" — and how credit is distributed.
Phew!