--- In extremeprogramming@yahoogroups.com, John Roth <JohnRoth1@...>
wrote:
> The story is that PERT was a Potemkin Village
> kind of thing. They did it to keep the auditors and
> Congress off their backs while they got the job done.

This is a great example of something that I call blocking, where you
produce the paperwork, attend the meetings, pretend to care, ... to
make it look as if you're following the "official process". See
http://www.ddj.com/dept/architect/184415008?cid=Ambysoft .

I used to ask people at conferences if they've ever done that, and
most people stuck up their hand. I would also ask whether they'd
been caught, and out of the thousands of people that had claimed to
have blocked at one point or the other only a few had been caught,
and none had been punished.

About a year and a half ago I got caught up in a flame war with
someone who claimed that this was an unethical thing to do. He
couldn't justify this of course, and naturally didn't want to budge
from his opinion. I personally thought that it was unethical for the
bureaucrats to force projects to do questionable activities which did
little more than justify the existence of the bureaucrats, be that as
it may. He was an enterprise process/governance person who clearly
leaned towards formal approaches and I highly suspected that he was
being blocked by a lot of teams in his company, hence he was upset
about the blocking concept being promoted as a good idea.

- Scott
Practice Leader Agile Development, IBM Rational