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Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the inspiration for the title is the very well regarded "Project Management Body of Knowledge" document maintained/published by the PMI.

People in the industry refer to the PMBOK ("Pimbock") pretty frequently. There are lots of people in big-time project management that disdain aspects of the PMI (including and especially the PMP certification, which is often re-named as "pretty much pointless"), but the PMBOK is a valuable document -- ESPECIALLY for people new to the field.

We could do worse, in software, than to emulate that particular success.

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> "I suspect the inspiration for the title is the very well regarded "Project Management Body of Knowledge" document maintained/published by the PMI."

While that's not impossible, it must be noted other STEM organizations that predate the PMI have their own "body of knowledge" definitions, for example:

- https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/resources/professio...

- https://www.asce.org/civil_engineering_body_of_knowledge/

- https://www.iise.org/details.aspx?id=43631

The PMBOK is in it's 6th Edition with a 7th expected this year. It is also a 756 page document at the moment.

I look forward to seeing the SWEBOK also improve over time.

Also, I'm not sure why some of the comments fail to acknowledge the benefit of having a collection of best practices intended to be tailored for each individual use case. That's what the PMBOK is and how it is used when used properly.

The PMBOK is a very good source for your vocabulary searches. But, especially for people new to the field, it's an incredibly harmful document. And the harm is entirely caused by the "it misleadingly looks authoritative while it's not and really shouldn't be" issue the GP stated.

I'm going to guess you haven't spent much time in the PM world if you think the PMBOK is harmful to new people instead of educational.

If nothing else, the PMBOK is valuable for PMs purely as a reference to the poisonous bullshit that is contained within it? Somewhat like the value of knowing about flat earth hypotheses and believers.

Oh, yes, I've spent enough time in the PM world to get tired of people justifying their procedures by claiming the PMBOK says it's the correct set of them (the PMBOK explicitly says it's not prescriptive, but it misleads people new people into thinking it is).

Got an example where PMBOK led someone astray?

> We could do worse, in software, than to emulate that particular success.

Perhaps, but couldn't we could do better instead?

There's already more than enough project management in software teams. Do we also have to emulate the all the turgid rules and mindless checklists that PM's use?

I suspect this is yet another attempt at forcing software engineering workflows into something that's more compatible with PM mentality. Or possibly to commoditize the practice of software engineering. IMHO, it's just a different kind of crack for some management consultants to offer to their c-suite clients.

"There's already more than enough project management in software teams. "

Given how poorly most software teams are run, I do not think this is demonstrably true.

"Do we also have to emulate the all the turgid rules and mindless checklists that PM's use?"

Programmers have a terrible reputation for refusing to entertain anything outside the process of programming. This kind of comment is emblematic of that mindset.

> Given how poorly most software teams are run, I do not think this is demonstrably true.

OK, but one does not "fix" organizational problems by adding more layers of PM.

I think many software engineers could get benefits out of learning some project management skills, but I must say I'm also skeptical of the benefits they'd get from more theoretical knowledge of project management in themselves.

But I also have an immediate reaction to the term "body of knowledge" in the context of PM, which is to reinterpret it as "cargo cult." Hopefully they have something different in mind here, but that's often what it ends up as in practice.

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