REPLY Society Strategy Development (SD7110)

[SDMAIL Bill Harris]

Posted by  Bill Harris <bill_harris at facilitatedsystems.com>

"SDMAIL Johann Heymann" <johann.heymann at fdg.co.za> writes:
> > 1.       Developing a formal System Dynamics Body of Knowledge (SDBOK) s
> > imilar to the PMBOK of the project management fraternity;
> >
> > 2.       Developing a SD practitioner maturity model; and
> >
> > 3.       SD Certification.

Johann,

May I ask why?

We have much that is already known about our field, written up in many
good texts and papers.  It would seem that the closest field to ours
isn't PM but control theory, and there is no CTBOK that I know of, nor
do I suspect there should be.  While PM could be arguably said to be a
process, control theory is a field of applied engineering -- applying
ever-developing knowledge to real-world problems.

  That said, I have concerns about codifying PM, as well, concerns that
  are related to my comments about certification.  I'm not in possession
  of PMBOK, but I'm curious: does it include XP and Scrum?  Does it
  include critical chain theory?  What is the process to include other
  newly-developing work?  How do you integrate or make sense of PRINCE2
  versus PMBOK?

As a former software quality manager, I found some things attractive
about the CMM, but my overall impression was that it was a tool that
(just as perhaps we here) didn't start with where we were nor where we
needed to be but posited, in a vacuum, what we needed to do.  I worried
that it might achieve good results at high cost compared to the action
research alternative we used successfully.

While I value competence, skill, and learning, I have real concerns
about certification.
http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/2008/06/hiring-is-hard-do-it-well.html
summarizes them briefly: my fear is that it freezes us in the past
rather than helps us in the future.

In summary, my concerns are these:

- - The approaches you've mentioned seem focused internally, not
  externally.  While I agree with much of Jay's article (I may agree
  with all of it, but I haven't re-read it in a while), I sense our
  failure is to a significant degree because we haven't connected as a
  field to customers where they are.  Put in marketing terms, we seem
  focused on outbound marketing, but we haven't done the inbound
  marketing yet.

- - The approaches you've mentioned seem focused on limiting the field,
  not expanding it.  

- - The approaches you've mentioned seem focused on getting us to remember
  the process.  While there's much for us to keep in our heads when
  doing this, in the Vygotskian sense, I gather that we're more often
  puzzling than pattern matching because of the nature of the problems
  we solve.  (There are, of course, sub-problems that require pattern
  matching.)

I realize I probably sound change-resistant in saying this, and I am
seriously curious as to the reasoning for your suggestions.  I suspect
it's the belief that we, as PMs and others, can market ourselves if we
can only point to certain people and say, "They're good (certified) at
this."  Yet most managers knew they needed PMs or PM skills; I don't
think they've broadly figured out they need SDers yet.

Thoughts?

Bill
Posted by  Bill Harris <bill_harris at facilitatedsystems.com>
posting date  Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:32:26 -0700