On complexity
Posted Jul 3, 2010 23:43 UTC (Sat) by
ndye (subscriber, #9947)
Parent article:
On the scalability of Linus
I'm happy to see Our Grumpy Editor raising this now. Allow me to summarize a relevant book:
- The New Plague: Organizations and Complexity
- William L Livingston
- ISBN 0937063037
- published 1985
An engineer analyzes how engineering projects too often fail simply because the project is more complex than the team, their management, and the stakeholders can understand. He concludes that project failure is a human problem.
The project team, before considering technical issues, must ensure that they themselves, their management, and the stakeholders, all share the following traits, in merely alphabetical order:
- open, effective communication
- curiosity
- integrity
- transparency
- and more I've left off
Without these, they have no chance.
He recommends always "taking sides" with the problem, because "solutions" change faster than the problem (and our understanding of both).
(
Log in to post comments)
