Are Project Management Tools Up For Their Task?

bas says : I love to point out that project management techniques haven't changed
much in decades. It's a kind of fetish to raise that topic; it is fun
to set a little fire under professional project managers that are proud
of their profession... it tends to make people a little more humble.

Software becomes more complex every day, but the pace of progress on
the management of things is almost coming to a complete stop.

A recent article called The 3D Manager raises the issue of the increasing
complexity due to changing organizational structures surrounding IT projects.
The recent offshore development extravaganza doesn't help there either...
it throws a cultural and huge geographical gap into the mix... And
project management is setting up Gantt Charts and white boards to coordinate
it all... talking about sticks and rocks. I like the notion of the article that this so
called "distributed change" is taking software projects from one dimensional
(sequential) to multidimensional; and our management tools
are mostly not up for this task.

But we try new tools, new checklists, now information systems (of course,
we within the IT keep ourselves bussy).

It just made me think of something a science philosopher called Beniger
wrote:

"control can be increased (..) by decreasing the amount of information
to be processed."

Beniger calls this ignoring of information preprocessing.
".. rationalization might be defined as the destruction or ignoring of
information in order to facilitate its processing."

Because we cannot cope with everything, we just plain ignore it...

"So commonplace has such preprocessing become that today we dismiss the
alternative (..) as hopelessly cumbersome and primitive."

Just think about that for a while.

Cheers,
Bas

Bernard says : So maximum control would stem from absolute ignorance? I'm having a hard time buying that proposition.