Obedience to Acapella, CRON/4

Putting an end to the PMdA story

My writing spree on this platform was spurred by the (hard) drive to fix what’s wrong with the project management discipline.

Over this period, I started and co-developed a startup project called ‘MUCHINIWAM’ (A Car Diagnostics Mobile Application, South Africa, 2018) which led to some breakthrough concepts around payment systems and the design process behind software products.

I also participated in a startup in the minibus industry that was promising at first, but proved fatalistic to my spirit, marriage and life in the end.

I have resigned to the city construct, for reasons outlined below.

PRODUCTION

I have since relented from my views around the role of V Cs and the superiority of Prepaid systems. I now believe that content is more key to the business paradigm than ‘machine-thinking’. Great leaders write! Poor leaders experiment.

Managing a project, within the production paradigm, is a planned task. This sort of project contains no real ‘innovations’. This is evident in the social media world (Facebook was not new but they developed a better production system); and in the consumer electronics world (Apple also never invented anything but had and still have probably the best production, distribution and prepaid systems in the history of the planet.).

This, simply, implies that project management is highly psychological. Which pertains to the perception of control that people need in order to function. But within a ‘production’ paradigm, this is largely driven by the psychological drive of ‘the very best product’. This clearly requires the entrepreneur of such a product to be an experienced product engineer themselves; failing which, the team looses confidence in the psychological certainty of the project.

Art is concomitant with this paradigm, and thus I absconded the belief in the arts and the entire fashion industry; except for the necessity of content as being more primary than artifact.

CONTENT

Truth be told, it is the select few software billionaires that barely seem to understand production. They are well-respected ‘script-writers’. When it comes to production, they are the worst engineers. The ones who succeed have to keep a tight control over their developing software to ensure success.

Script-writing is all about content. But in software, this implies one has a unique algorithm either for manipulating code or for generating data. In hardware; this implies a ‘script’ of sorts is required. In a production-paradigm, this sort of script would be designed as a ‘project plan’, to be ‘controlled by a project manager’; but within a city-construct-paradigm, this script provides a resolution to how the project can be gradually completed over a multiple of fixed-time-slots.

Agile methods generate noise; while production-friendly methods despise human fallibility, all in the name of ‘self-tolerant’ design. Fixed-time-slots is something that agile methods, in general, and older project management approaches are used to. But they were poorly arranged around ‘management’, rather than around productivity. Agile, is definitively the worst of the lot, suitable only for evil scientists, asshole artists and greedy financiers.

Great leaders script to ensure psychological certainty.

PRODUCTIVITY

Apparently, physical production systems necessitate the reduction of lab our costs. Which I strongly disagree with. But it is still an argument that applies in the fields of construction, retail and public services. But it is not, and will never be, an argument that applies in the field of high quality goods.

Productivity, in the end, is not a function of capital; as many would like to protest. It is a measurement that makes sense only in relationship to assets. If we grant that machines, and not people or raw material, are assets then it stands to reason that we would like our machines to be as reliable as possible, to ensure quality, and people to be as focused as possible on writing marketing/content scripts, to ensure high desirability for the product brand. But many in these related-content sectors are growing weary of writing glowingly about products they know, for a fact, to be rubbish.

It is the modern CTO and CIO who aught to be blamed for this damnable omission: companies produce things that a non-engineer can barely find words for. Given that the product, after all, will not be bought if it is not published, it is clear that many companies only succeed by writing convincing scripts that lie to consumers. It is for this reason that I do not believe in sales people; and never will! It is also for this reason that I find most CFOs to be the most despicable; lawyers are far more humane!

It is the CEO’s job to ensure the highest levels of ‘corporate hygiene’ in sales and financial management; but productivity will solely be based on which assets he proceeds to buy, prioritize and sustain.

COMMISSIONING

‘Projects’, instead of being viewed as ‘managed complexity’, aught to be viewed as the ultimate asset for the modern enterprise.

They are the complex interplay of machine, people and outputs that are achieved by ever-evolving, seasonal, and fixed-time-slot-driven processes.

Every project/cron requires a commissioner who assigns a leaf to each engineer; no one needs to keep the unproductive leaf.

After a multiple of fixed-time-slots, the crons/production can be filed as completed; optimisations, verifications and selections of output can occur within the cron commission.