Viewing posts for the category Personally Roland
... and understanding why I like Plone so much (even if I sometimes find it inexplicable). Install Zope, install Plone, add a plone site in zope and voila, you have a working site, including a number of advanced types and JavaScript integration and editing. And all this without even having to edit a number of config-files and understand why the examples doesn't work or hacking the HTTP-server to death or struggling to understand why you need something for development and something else for production.
For a service-company, like an un-named Outsourcing company, it is, in my opinion, paramount that the service-company and the customer stops treating each other as supplier-customer, and instead goes into partnership with each other. If the "customer" decides that the "supplier" must be challenged all the time and pressed for a better price, it makes the customer very unattractive and forces the supplier to abandon the customer (it may earn the customer a few dollars/euros in the short run, but will be detrimental in the long run).
Let's start with a warning: you need to be a serious programmer to appreciate this humour, but if you are, you'll risk splitting a vein laughing....
In the 80s and later in the 90s, we had a stupid organization model, called a matrix. The idea behind this is that everyone should have two managers (excepting the top executives themselves, of course), and that they should cooperate and coordinate with the best interest of the company foremost in their minds. This is of course bullshit, as any person who have met a bunch of ambitious mid-managers or defensive, semi-competent, moronic mid-managers, that will do anything to survive, can testify to. People work for their self-interest first and the company second, and if you don't understand that, you shouldn't be in management. Fortunately, the survivorship of the CEOs that tried to implement these abonominations was on average 30 months, even though it usually was painful months.
What is really irritating as an old PM is the lack of PM that exists in many organisations. A lot of PL/PM is young people that has been promoted to it nearly directly after school and is still learning what to do, after having worked 5-10 years in the role. Not very successful at all times.