FREE THE LITTLE BOOK OF MANAGEMENT BOLLOCKS: WHY BE HUMAN WHEN YOU COULD BE A MANAGER? PDF Alistair Beaton | 144 pages | 04 Jun 2001 | SIMON & SCHUSTER | 9780743404136 | English | New York, United States The Little Book of Management Bollocks by Alistair Beaton | Waterstones I thinking planning is absolutely necessary if you want to avoid disaster. But anyone who thinks they can predict exactly what will happen over the life of a project, exactly how much it will cost and how long it will take is some bizarre hybrid of a lunatic and a liar. He used the term to describe cyberspace. Which allows for some cool descriptions of pseudo-physical interactions with data. For ease of understanding, everyone treats this abstract concept as a concrete reality. Life is full of consensual hallucinations. If you live in a democracy, you tend to believe you have a say in what happens in your life. The consensual hallucination of participatory democracy is more comforting. In fact, pretty much any political or religious belief system is a consensual hallucination. Which is not to say that they are by definition untrue. Believe in your magic friend in the sky all you like. Who needs empirical evidence when banding together with other believers makes the consensual hallucination feel true? But we put our faith in the idea that someone smarter than us got it right. Which gets me back to project management, specifically, how it applies in the world of IT. The consensual hallucination that permeates nearly all of IT is that the magic pixie dust of project management can reveal The Truth. In the broadest possible sense, this is true. If you have enough experience you can probably do better than a wild-arsed guess. IT people like logical. But The Little Book of Management Bollocks: Why be Human When You Could be a Manager? someone gets the project management religion, they think they can be precise. Business people like precise. But some people are completely fucking insane when it comes to this topic. Some people believe Project Management should tell you these things down to the day and the dollar. A project plan should tell you every task that needs to be completed. A project plan should be flawless and leave nothing to chance. And a project plan should be completed before ANY work is done on the project. OK, take a fucking pill, man. That is straight up insanity. Planning, or at least goal setting, at some level is obviously important. So how do we escape the consensual hallucination that there is a way to do project management that is absolutely foolproof and provides definitive answers? Well, I propose we kill all the consultants. Just throw the fuckers up against the wall and shoot them. How about we tone it down a bit. We could staple their tongues to their chins. How about we all sit down to a big three-course serving of reality? This can save many packed lunches of pain and misery. They make it clear that they think the lack of an answer comes from laziness or evasiveness. Worse still, managers often insist on being given an answer even when they know the answer is wrong. So long as everyone understands an estimate is just that: an estimate. You learn as you go along and discover more detail. So you revise the estimate accordingly. For this to work, everyone involved has to listen, everyone has to be open, everyone has to be responsive. So what are you going to be? A jerk who worships at the altar of whatever project management methodology is flavour of the month? Or a realist who can accept that things change and all projects can be unpredictable? Your decision makes a big difference. Filed under Work. I might have to print a t-shirt with some of this on it and wear it around the office. I think it was someone like George Washington, but my knowledge of quotable american revolutionaries is a bit lacking. Not always what they wanted to hear. A project manager can do some very useful things. The most important for me is to act as a shit filter; that is, to stop the customer shit which blasts through the fan from hitting the programmers. Then there are things that programmers need done to get work done and a good PM handles these things. I hate being a Project Manager because you have to rely on other people to do their jobs and more often than not they let me down. Wynand: I absolutely agree that a good manager is invaluable. Cinnkitty: A big bureaucracy like Lucent would be a nightmare. And I agree with you about relying on others being stressful. And the worker is automatically on the defensive if it goes over the estimate. How are you managing, then? Go read it already! Thanks for the post. They chose to have me as a project manager in one of my past lives. If I had had your post then, it would have saved so much time. I thought it was just me losing my mind. Pingback: Friday File - 27 July, This is a great article. Should be published on PMI site. All budding and would be managers or damagers should read it at the start. I am yet to see competency in this field. For some reason, I tend to think of them as secretaries and I call them to meetings just so they can take down notes and schedule follow-up meetings, and do a little bit of call-coordination. In the USA in the 19th Century people I understand that people with no legitimate means of making a living used to travel from town to town with bags made of old carpet filled with yellowish liquid. Today, project managers turn up on IT projects and say they can apply the same tried and tested techniques used to produce the last 15 widgets made on the production line to a complex project involving the equivalent of millions of components never integrated before, and produce it on budget, on time, to quality and scope. The years of experience gathered by the technical people who make the project work is simply not relevant to success. IMHO they sell very expensive snake oil to CEOs and dump large amounts of smelly stuff on people who actually know something about technical stuff and the business. Planning is required. Anyone with half a brain knows that without needing to think about it. The result is often either nervous breakdown amongst techies, project failure or The Little Book of Management Bollocks: Why be Human When You Could be a Manager? combination of both. But somehow the rate of that never seems to be recorded. JAYT and Monish — could not agree more. Linux on Oracle. These dumbasses make as much, if not more than the very sharp and smart techies in our group. Talk about a recession. Very amusing. Or perhaps you, like all IT workers are a terrible communicator, too involved in your own misguided feelings of superiority to even chance communicating with your team, your management etc. Rest assured if that fucked up attitude is what you radiate at work every single person you work with is plotting ways to kill you. And I hope they succeed soon you worthless fucking cunt. I must say any PM without previous tech hand-on experience is simply a babysitter to the techies. But it does work. Then it can work. LOL, I typed project management is bullshit into google out of frustration and your article came up. We use agil. The best use for it seems to me to be a way to cut down on all the stuff the business wants into managable chunksie. So, we have a schedule, timeline and deliverables at each juncture. For this I am thankful for them, even if they have zero The Little Book of Management Bollocks: Why be Human When You Could be a Manager? skills and are constantly pushing for times and dates when a lot of the time, there is no way to predict this. At least they keep track of things. Project management may be boring, but it really does help, and also allows for people just to track their estimates regularly and stop massive The Little Book of Management Bollocks: Why be Human When You Could be a Manager? times to some degree. In all honesty I totally get the comments in this article. Where development or new systems are involved its a totally different story. Personally I think the answer lies in The Little Book of Management Bollocks: Why be Human When You Could be a Manager? governance over the programme office. Wherby the techies actually ok the buisness cases before they proceed. Sex Pistols - Wikipedia Please sign in to write a review. If you have changed your email address then contact us and we will update your details. Would you like to proceed to the App store to download the Waterstones App? We have recently updated our Privacy Policy. The site uses cookies to offer you a better experience. By continuing to browse the site you accept our Cookie Policy, you can change your settings at any time. Paperback Alistair Beaton author Sign in to write a review. In stock Usually dispatched within 24 hours. Quantity Add to basket. This item has been added to your basket View basket Checkout. Your local Waterstones may have stock of this item. Showing the same incisive and outrageous wit as in his previous books, where he first took on the self-help craze then New Labour's addiction to spin, Alistair Beaton now tackles the management gurus.