Prisoners of Our Habits - Act Two

Prisoners of Our Habits. Act two. Project manager enters.

PM:   -"You need to focus on project's
        paper deliverables for the next two months"

DEV1: -"Which papers you mean? For whom they are,
        and for what purpose?"

PM:   -"I do not know, but reviewers know all the
        buzzwords, so my ass needs to be covered."

DEV1: -"Eh, That does not sound so valuable and motivating?"

PM:   -"It's not supposed to be. I fill in dashboards
        which no one reads. You should have no problem
        creating papers with no value."

...

The above is not a Dilbert strip. It is status quo in many development projects. Dashboards illustrating Gannts, PERTTs etc. are what we traditionally use for project management, and paper documents are what we traditionally use for progress monitoring and project quality assurance. So what the hell is wrong with that you ask? Again, it is a nice model, I really do like it. It has only one flaw; it does not hold in reality.

Then again working prototype, incremental release plan, Sprint backlog, or burndown chart are not used traditionally.

And old habits are slow to die.