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Tuesday, 11 February 2014

Why Project Managers Cannot be Good Christians

An unemployed IT project manager, who is also a devout Christian, contacts me to ask my careers advice.

Turns out her job prospects are being damaged by the Twitter account "Baptist Bible Hour". As it told her:

"Beware of Worry: your inability to plan the future is your strength, 
if it leads you to rely on Christ"

Can you imagine, she asks, how her job interviews have gone lately?

"So, Ms P.M. Candidate.  Under what circumstances would you put an entry in the risk register? "

"I wouldn't. Because a risk is a symptom of worry.  It implies an uncertain future, and that would mean I had no faith."

"OK. Can you tell me about your planning tools?  Are you used to MS Project, or Open Workbench?  What do you use to track dependencies?"

"No, I am incapable of planning.  I find that being unable to plan leads me to depend on Christ"

"So - surely - a complex project.  Standard waterfall, or maybe an iterative approach?"

"HERETIC!!!! REPENT OR BURN!"

Thirty-eight interviews. No second interviews.  Despite the fact she's never prepared for them, because that would be planning.

I've suggested she adopts an Agile methodology.  That regards planning as a loss of faith, as well.

1 comment:

  1. Real geeks don't plan; that would involve talking to people and compromise neither of which advance their knowledge of Mongo sharding strategies so....

    ReplyDelete

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