The project manager is usually in conflict with the development team because they're thinking about things in project management ways, and the team is thinking about things in development terms ("let me bang out this righteous code...")
As a team lead at Kodak (in a very, very Waterfall environment), I was in a position where I had to be in both headspaces simultaneously, and be the bridge between the two worlds. There are definitely two skill sets: the "hackerly" skill set of producing excellent code quickly, and the "process-oriented" skill set which includes what you describe, but also some things that eXP developers take for granted, such as testing. The real answer is that heavyweight methodologies really want all of the developers, not just the leads and management, to wind up in the process management headspace. The CMM-ish headspace is all about having things neatly contained in manageable boxes, which is hard to do and still retain the ability to produce creative solutions that require thinking outside the box.
The headspace of project management is a shibboleth. It divides.
eXP's ability to align project management and individual developer goals is wonderful (getting my team to spend time on good tests was like pulling teeth before I switched us to eXP-under-CMM). I've been in IT management, though, and I can definitely see a danger of eXP becoming a shibboleth of its own, dividing the project management level from the Director level within an IT organization. It could be argued that the C3 project is a good example of precisely that phenomenon.
On the gripping hand, Kodak spent gobs and gobs of money funding a SPI organization with a headcount larger than most eXP shops, whose aim was to get the company's software organizations to CMM level 3 and above using a home-grown custom process based on the way that Kodak manufactures equipment and film. We had barely gotten to level 2 before I left, and that by stretching the truth considerably, and it had been an ongoing effort for multiple years before I was hired. And even at supposed CMM level 2, our whole process was profoundly broken. I'm not sure how much it cost Intelliware, or how long it took, to get the whole organization up to speed on eXP at first, but it had to have been whole orders of magnitude cheaper per developer, which is a big win.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-24 10:26 am (UTC)As a team lead at Kodak (in a very, very Waterfall environment), I was in a position where I had to be in both headspaces simultaneously, and be the bridge between the two worlds. There are definitely two skill sets: the "hackerly" skill set of producing excellent code quickly, and the "process-oriented" skill set which includes what you describe, but also some things that eXP developers take for granted, such as testing. The real answer is that heavyweight methodologies really want all of the developers, not just the leads and management, to wind up in the process management headspace. The CMM-ish headspace is all about having things neatly contained in manageable boxes, which is hard to do and still retain the ability to produce creative solutions that require thinking outside the box.
The headspace of project management is a shibboleth. It divides.
eXP's ability to align project management and individual developer goals is wonderful (getting my team to spend time on good tests was like pulling teeth before I switched us to eXP-under-CMM). I've been in IT management, though, and I can definitely see a danger of eXP becoming a shibboleth of its own, dividing the project management level from the Director level within an IT organization. It could be argued that the C3 project is a good example of precisely that phenomenon.
On the gripping hand, Kodak spent gobs and gobs of money funding a SPI organization with a headcount larger than most eXP shops, whose aim was to get the company's software organizations to CMM level 3 and above using a home-grown custom process based on the way that Kodak manufactures equipment and film. We had barely gotten to level 2 before I left, and that by stretching the truth considerably, and it had been an ongoing effort for multiple years before I was hired. And even at supposed CMM level 2, our whole process was profoundly broken. I'm not sure how much it cost Intelliware, or how long it took, to get the whole organization up to speed on eXP at first, but it had to have been whole orders of magnitude cheaper per developer, which is a big win.