Project Realities Explained?
I’m hoping it does me some good to constantly complain. The particular hope is that I am forced to think about all sides of an issue. Although, I imagine it might cause the reverse; cause me to channel my thoughts on well-worn pathways.
It is with this idea in mind that I bring up some thoughts about Business Management in General, and this Project Management class I’m in, but most specifically… the Group Project. I promise not to merely complain! I have in mind a way to use my complaints as a rubric to apply to other problems:
When we sat down in our groups that first night of class, we were lacking some of the puzzle pieces. If I hear the phrase “That’s the way it is in Real Life” one more time, I’m going to scream. Here are a few ways in which that is correct, but I’ve added some rebuttals:
- You’re not going to know the people in your team. Not true all the time. You probably have some working knowledge of the people in your team. It may not be necessary, but that kind of familiarity is going to go a long way towards bridging other gaps.
- You’re not going to get to choose the project. Who says? And anyway, sometimes having a project imposed on you is pleasant. I see myself as a problem-solver. I like a challange. We wound up having a brainstorming session where we had difficulty communicating ideas with each other because, once again, we lack a shared background, and more than that, we’re not part of an organization engaged in business. A bunch of students are in the business of studying. A bunch of employees have already been engaged in that business activity. Add a few new hires to the mix, and it’s only different by degrees. BTW, do people really sit around in groups coming up with ideas for projects? Because, I think ideas come from immediate needs. In the Real World, I have to imagine that a superior either has an idea to peddle, or a widely acknowledged problem exists, and it’s just sitting out there like a target for the next clever person who cares enough to try / thinks they can get the glory. Yet another way that the people who will constitute your real group have a shared context.
- People have different strengths and weeknesses. Granted. You’re not going to know up front who is best suited for which tasks. But now I’m seeing a problem with group work altogether. I was looking at it like a sports team, and don’t I plenty of sports analogies in business school? But there are more customer-supplier relationships than anything else, aren’t there? We as a culture seem to love these scenarios where two groups of five guys battle it out on a basketball court, and it looks like they are “teams”. It’s not really about those guys - they’re only the visible part of the organization, so everybody tends to focus on them. Some of them are just there in case another guy gets tired, or injured.
- My list is falling apart. That’s a good enough reason to stop. Looking back, I haven’t changed my mind. No one Real World factor ruins it. It’s about how the deck has to be stacked for the sake of a class. If real world aspects are to be mastered, maybe this isn’t the forum for doing it.
In addition to all this, something I consider my own peculiar problem: Artificial situations bug me. Artificial situations do not fall on a spectrum from Abstract to Concrete, or from General to Particular. Artificial situations pretend to be more concrete or particular than they really are. You lose the power of being abstract or general without really gaining much. I think the class I’m in sends the wrong message: Through this process of making things up, you will prepare yourself. But you’re skipping the power tools of generality, and you’re not getting any real experiences that allow you to build up the tools from the particulars. The worst part of it is, those tools are laying out for the taking. Other people have developed the healthy attitude “Don’t waste your time with things that aren’t on the test.” And I’m under too much stress to really try out the tools in the short run.
Why would you want to be specific with false detail? Now I realize that I’ve suddenly tarred all fiction writing. But think again: Not all fiction is needlessly artificial. Good fiction is true in the details, even if that particular story never happened. The artifice in fiction is surely the source of endless debate. I don’t even care for narrative all that much. Give me an idea-space to explore any day. I’ve heard a lot of the arguments, so you can probably save it: I think I know what good fiction consists of, and I think there are a lot of crappy writers out there, in addition to the good writers who make good novels out of ideas I don’t care about. There is a lot of crappy non-fiction too. I like a good novel, when I can find one, I prefer good nonfiction that isn’t so worried about telling a story, but best of all is a textbook. That’s right, I said textbook. I guess deep down I’m a scientist.
Posted by Evan Bittner Sun, 21 May 2006 17:10:00 GMT
