As a forty-year veteran of IT, technical writing, "business analysis," and "best practices" scutwork I know there are a great many project planning tools, including the so-called "agile" ones (Scrum, etc) and of course PMBOK. Beyond this, there are what are called "frameworks"--eg ITIL and COBIT--that provide standards for the IT management of organizations. Basically technical standards like NIST 800-53(cybersecurity) go from a management planning perspective down to the "weeds" of the actual technical work. (The NIST standards are mostly applied to government work and government contracting; there are also ISO standards used by the so-called "private sector",) Carnegie-Mellon provides methods for risk management, and a Capability Maturity Model that is used by organizations to improve processes and by auditors to assess the implementation of IT management on a five-step scale from Initial to Optimal.
All of this stuff is duller than ditchwater--after being retired for less than six months, I seem to have forgotten nearly all of it and wonder how I kept my eyes open all that time (fear). But the vast work of building technical and management infrastructure is absolutely dependent on standards, procedures, and best practices, even when these walk a fine line between capitalist ideology and pure technique. This may be why economists like Michael Roberts and V. Giacche, who work "in the belly of the beast" so to speak, are able to provide useful Marxist economic analysis--you can read about this stuff in business school, but specialized training and certification are required for actual gov. and private business work, and only experience can show you how things actually work in the ever-shifting infrastructure without which business processes could not interoperate. As to procedure writing, I know from firsthand experience no effective procedure can be written without an end-to-end analysis of the processes within which it operates and which it affects. In general, I think many people on the left regard all this painful, nitpicking stuff as "bullshit work" and either assume we can do without it or that the invisible hand of the dialectic will resolve all difficulties once society is placed on a correct socialist path. I don't believe in either of these wishful shortcuts, though I can't deny that I am grateful for no longer having to beat my head against the many stone walls one runs into in actual project work. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#5337): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/5337 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/79555899/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
