I’m reading Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth. It’s an excellent book and I recommend it highly. Although I hope to write a bit of a review once I’m through the book, this post, however, concerns a quote from his book that just struck me on a number of levels. Strategy makes sense as a project only in the context of uncertainty, or, more generally, in a context where pure reason will not deliver a definitive answer to the question “what is to be done?” But a purely rational framework … leaves no space for such “irrationality.” So the framework solves strategic problems only in a context where there is no possibility that such problems will arise. A stunning statement. And it reminds me oh so much of Project Management, especially as applied to software projects — which, to be honest, are highly irrational. However, we try to push some form of framework atop a project only to watch projects flounder the more tightly we adhere to a given framework or project management strategy. Stewart’s book reminds me of deMarco’s recent paper in the IEEE on Project Management and this choice quote: My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement,
