Carbon Project Management
There’s a brand new project management methodology sweeping the nation, it’s called Carbon Project Management.* It’s fairly simple. Essentially, the steps are:
- Write whatever task needs to be done on a carbon form.
- Give the top copy to whoever is doing the work (the developer)
- Take the first carbon copy and give that to the person who will verify that the task is done (QA)
- The second carbon copy goes to the project manager to hold on to.
- When the task is done, the developer gives his/her copy to QA.
- QA staples this copy to the QA version.
- When the QA test is done, the two sheets are given to the project manager.
- The project manager then staples those two forms to his/her own copy.
- The list of stapled forms comprise the next release.
Sounds fairly silly doesn’t it? But how often do we put with something very similar in digital form. Instead of walking papers around and stapling them together, we click drop-downs to reassign tasks. We often manually verify data, manually move to various different states etc.
In the end, we’ve really just digitized a carbon form, and not really solved much except possibly reducing file cabinet space.
* That’s a total fabrication, I made up this whole idea tonight. Then again, you’re smart enough that you already realized that.