Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of my hero of project management, Tom DeMarco.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_DeMarco

His approach was that every task is either 100% complete or 0% complete.

No task is ever "80%" complete. If you really think that it is, then break it down into smaller tasks, 80% of which are 100% complete and 20% of which are 0% complete. This way it becomes much clearer what is complete and what remains to be done.

I have never allowed anyone to report anything as n% complete for values other than 0 or 100. As soon as someone does, that's a pretty good sign that they may be confusing motion with action.

Remember OP's discussion with Jim...

  Me: Jim, how are we doing with getting Ansys ported?
  Jim: Great, I have a bunch of calls into them.
  Me: How are we doing on the Nastran port?
  Jim: Wonderful, they said they’ll get back to me next month.
  Me: How about Dyna 3D?
  Jim: It’s going great, we’re on their list.

Now imagine how much different that conversation would be if each question started with, "Which tasks are complete and which tasks are incomplete?"

There is something very sexy about this.

Yet, I can think of situations where this is counterproductive. Take sales. Any company that has a sales cycle can create predictive models after a certain amount of time. They can make predictions like 80% of sales close after point x. So if a sales dept has 100 sales at point x, they can predict about 80 will close. If this model has proven to be mostly accurate over a period of time, it can bring a heathy sense of stability and consistency in the company.

I couldn't tell where Steve stands with this exactly but isn't a linear sales process what allows sales-focused companies to be able to scale? I know in the case Steve described it was not the way to go because the sales cycle hadn't been proven and needed to be developed. But once developed, you don't want to be reinventing the wheel each time a new sales guy joins the team right?

That's a prediction, not an outcome. Predictions are useful, but they aren't the same as outcomes at all.

(This is a different thing to the Motion/Action discussion, too)

I used to run a meetup group, and on their site they allow users to RSVP "Yes, No, or Maybe." Along your same lines, I found Maybe to be utterly useless. It was really just a "No" for people who don't like saying no, so I disabled it (thankfully they give you that option).

Either you show up at an appointment or you don't.

Along the same lines, when you start a business, either you're profitable, or you're not. I've seen plenty of startups do the whole "motion" thing, busying themselves with building their product and twiddling knobs, meeting, and imagining how big they'll need to scale some day. Non of which is action.

I agree with that approach and use it myself. But from a project manager's standpoint it is useful to know which tasks are incomplete versus not even started. In a tool like MS Project I arbitrarily mark any started task as 10% complete to serve as a visual indicator that someone is actively working on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com