
No best practices: The fallacy of methodologies - aditya
http://danieltenner.com/posts/0016-no-best-practices.html
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derefr
> When someone picks out the bits that might work for a specific project but
> doesn’t succeed, the blame that they receive is "you didn’t follow the whole
> methodology".

I wouldn't say "blame", really; it's more that you shouldn't say you failed
while doing X, if you weren't really doing X. That casts a bad light on X,
whether it was X's fault or yours that the project failed. Just say you were
adopting an organic/syncretic methodology, and leave it at that.

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pvg
After 4 years at Accenture with a responsibility for 'process' in one's title
and enough free time to gain a familiarity with Dilbert cartoons but not
enough to consider the possibility that perhaps people have thought deeply
about these problems before. Maybe they even wrote papers.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_silver_bullet>

And they did, except better. They even came up with that title, except better.

~~~
swombat
There are no such thing as old jokes, my friend. To a newborn, every joke is a
world première.

~~~
pvg
I sort of expect someone who's held a job in tech and self-describes as a CTO
of a start-up to actually know some of the good old jokes. My expectations of
newborns, are, as you suggest, less stringent.

~~~
swombat
I tend to write for my readers as opposed to writing for myself. I've rarely
found out something that I didn't already know, from reading one of my own
blog posts!

It seems you got this impression from reading this post that this is a new
realisation for me - it's not, I just happened to write about it now. I'll try
to make that clearer in future posts.

~~~
pvg
_It seems you got this impression from reading this post that this is a new
realisation for me - it's not_

I didn't know you were the author of the post. The impression I got was that
you were blithely unaware of the basic literature on the subject. And really,
if you're going to make a post called 'No best practices' and don't reference
Brooks at all, it's hard to come up with explanations other than 'plagiarism'
or 'ignorance'.

In fact, while I have you on the line, let me ask you directly - had you read
the Brooks essay?

~~~
swombat
Yes, I have. I'm not quite sure how "someone wrote a related paper 30 years
ago" prevents me from writing a blog post on a topic that I want to write
about, though.

~~~
pvg
Well the thing is, someone actually wrote a seminal, much quoted paper 30
years ago. _You_ wrote a _"related"_ platitude-laden derivative and borrowed
the title 30 years later. Nothing prevents you from doing that at all. Common
decency suggests you should reference the original, if you were, as you claim,
well aware of it. That's all.

~~~
swombat
Please note that I said I have read that paper. That doesn't mean I was
thinking of that paper when I wrote this blog post. Pardon me for not having
absolutely everything I have read in mind whenever I write a blog post.

Anyway, this conversation is incredibly tedious. I'm done with this thread.

~~~
pvg
You noted it here, not in your post. Citing references and work your work is
based on is certainly quite tedious. Sometimes doing the right thing is
tedious. Doesn't make it any less right.

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j_baker
I agree with this post 100%. _However_ , there is one thing I'd like to note.
While I agree that one should not be blindly obedient to methodologies, one
should make an informed decision about what parts to pick and choose. Unless
you've actually tried the _whole thing_ , chances are you won't be informed
enough to make a good decision. Otherwise, it's way too easy to look at some
parts of the methodology and say "well that just sounds stupid" without really
seeing the benefit.

I'm not saying everyone needs to drink the Koolaid at first, but I do feel
that it's better to err on the Koolaid side until you have a better
understanding of what works and what doesn't.

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rbanffy
> the methodology is rarely to blame for a failed project

Truth is, it's always the person in charge who is to blame.

That and natural disasters, but those are far less frequent.

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edw519
OP's post says more about the consulting industry than the best practices they
promote. Let me explain...

I was brought in by a Big 5 firm to rescue some of their clusterfucks. One
project was 18 months old and one year behind. Another was "90% complete" for
the past year. They gave me a laptop with their own systems analysis / project
management app on it. Everything had to go through it. After 2 days it was
clear that this "system" was cause of most of their problems. Why? Because no
one thought any more. They just plugged everything into the app and submitted
the reports every Friday whether anything made sense or not.

I showed the app to a friend of mine who was an expert consultant (not Big
5!). It was clear to him why they did this.

He said, "The sole purpose of 'best practices' and tools like this are to make
people who don't know what they're doing _appear_ as if they did. They pay
people $50 per hour and bill them at $300 per hour. The difference, after
expenses, goes to the partners. That's their business model. It's that simple.
So, forget about best practices and just do your fucking job. You'll eat them
alive."

Thanks, Tom. I've been doing that ever since. You were right.

~~~
notauser
What he actually said was that his consulting company told him not to use all
of the process all of the time but rather to pick and chose the bits that were
appropriate.

I'm not saying that you are lying about your experience, or that I have much
respect for the big consulting companies or their business models, but your
comments misleadingly characterize what he posted.

(In my experience the big companies I have worked for had better processes,
and better guidance on how to apply them. But they had to have that to cater
for some of their other issues.)

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halffull
It's _method_ , not _methodology_. The former refers to a specific process or
procedure employed to accomplish a task while the latter describes the study
of such processes and procedures. The discussion we are engaging in here is a
form of methodology; the things being discussed are methods.

I don't tend to get hung-up on usage, but it really is shocking to see how
many articles, blog posts, and comments written on this subject make this
mistake.

~~~
nollidge
Merriam-Webter [1]:

1 : a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline : a
particular procedure or set of procedures

2 : the analysis of the principles or procedures of inquiry in a particular
field

You're speaking of definition (2), but OP is using (1) properly, in my
estimation.

[1] <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/methodology>

~~~
halffull
USAGE NOTE Methodology can properly refer to the theoretical analysis of the
methods appropriate to a field of study or to the body of methods and
principles particular to a branch of knowledge. In this sense, one may speak
of objections to the methodology of a geographic survey (that is, objections
dealing with the appropriateness of the methods used) or of the methodology of
modern cognitive psychology (that is, the principles and practices that
underlie research in the field). In recent years, however, methodology has
been increasingly used as a pretentious substitute for method in scientific
and technical contexts, as in The oil company has not yet decided on a
methodology for restoring the beaches. People may have taken to this practice
by influence of the adjective methodological to mean "pertaining to methods."
Methodological may have acquired this meaning because people had already been
using the more ordinary adjective methodical to mean "orderly, systematic."
But the misuse of methodology obscures an important conceptual distinction
between the tools of scientific investigation (properly methods) and the
principles that determine how such tools are deployed and interpreted.

<http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=methodology>

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Mz
It's always good to distinguish between rules and judgment. Rules should
assist in good judgment, not supplant it and push it out. This is essentially
the root of much criticism of government and other large bureaucracies: That
you often can't do things which make sense because it is against some silly
rule. Start-ups have a chance to put good judgment to use without being
hampered by entrenched, illogical, outdated or counterproductive rules.
Hopefully, they will take that opportunity and run with it and then resist
temptation to implement a bunch of bad rules (which is basically the topic of
discussion of several recent threads here along the lines of "Don't go
punishing all of your customers over the actions of one/a few").

