Roscoe s First Picture

Roscoe's First Picture

No sooner had we settled into a pair of creaky old rockers when Roscoe took a stubby pencil out of his pocket and drew a picture on a paper napkin. This picture is reproduced as Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1. Roscoe's first drawingshort vectors.

"Now, we know from elementary geometry that, in a perfect world, the shortest distance between the start of the project and the finish (the 'target') is the straight dotted line I just drew. Waterfall guys are under the illusion that they can follow that path, but we have just demonstrated the three reasons why they can't. Really good project managers follow a path like the other one I drew, that goes from S1 to S2 to S3, and so onthat involves a series of small steps before you converge on a result. I call each of these steps a vector, which comes from air traffic control lingo. You software guys would call each step an iteration."

"Looks like a sailboat tacking into the wind," I remarked.

"Sure enough, but let's just stick to the geometry for a minute. I want to contrast this path with the path a project manager might follow if he were trying to do everything in just a couple or three iterations." Roscoe took another sip of coffee and grabbed another napkin.