Project Punditry
An alternative path for the spiritually inclined technology professional
I’ve been exploring ancient Mayan and Aztecan pyramids recently and I’ve always been fascinated with ancient Indian superstructures. The scale of what can be accomplished with religious zeal, a lack of modern distractions and a healthy amount of indentured labor is astonishing. Recent projects have lost connection with their sacred origins. While we can’t fix the modern distractions and I definitely hope indentured labor is gone for good, I think there’s something to be said for bringing back religious zeal. And it all starts with how our projects are planned.
Modern software projects typically go through a long planning process. There’s the creation of business requirements. Then R&D. Maybe some prototyping. Locking in the user requirements. A little implementation. There might be a few rounds of manufacturing and testing. There are bugs to be fixed, of course. And finally, marketing and launch. In all these stages, not *once* are the proper astrological calendars consulted. Nor are the horoscopes of the project team in question verified to check for grievous incompatibilities. This is to our peril. As any Hindu worth their salt will tell you, a good Pundit (no, not that kind of Pundit) can make these problems go away while providing the necessary gravitas to the proceedings.
The problem in many companies is there is no clear path to hire a Pundit (or Purohit for my fellow brown folk from the south). They’re typically not very good with NDAs and they will rely on anachronistic techniques. We need modern Pundits to bridge this gap. Think people who know the basics of SDLC as well as a working knowledge of the Puranas. Bug burndowns and Vedic chanting. Personality types and Rashis. The key here I think is to hire and train from within.
The folks who may end up being good Principal Project Pundits, aka Triple Ps (they start at the most senior IC band for obvious reasons), start off a bit disgruntled. They’ve been at the game long enough to know when things aren’t going well but have no outlet for their frustrations. They are also used to unrealistic timelines from the powers that be that make no real sense. They’ve been toiling away at projects doomed to fail with no clear way of channeling their doomsday predictions. If they do end up bringing up grievances, they are mostly met with subtle encouragement that they should “be more positive” and act more like a “team player”. Left to their own devices, people like this, if embedded in the team, have the capacity to torpedo a project single handedly. If properly handled, they can serve an important purpose for the organization - sanctifying work and tempering expectations.
The benefits of this role are many. An incomplete list in no particular order:
In traditional companies, no news is good news and bad news is moral failure. The main job of the Project Pundit will be to package bad news in a sufficiently cosmic way that it externalizes any and all blame (while still, you know, delivering the news).
Traditional companies also rely on false precision to provide launch dates. The Project Pundit can use a combination of astrological knowhow and gut instinct to create a date that the entire team views as divinely ordained. This invests the date with enough importance not to slip. Making sure not to ship during Amavasya is a happy byproduct.
Software projects have a poor track record already. They run 45% over budget while delivering 56% less value than expected. Our Triple P can help the bitter pill of blown expectations go down easier by prescribing the management team a set of rituals to perform to make the next project go better.
Projects generally flounder in the messy middle and the teams lose confidence (and sometimes disband). To prevent this state, a Pundit can perform another set of rituals guaranteeing (a form of) project success, thus getting the team back on track.
It’s time to start building again. We need hundreds of people to invest many years to do important work. Make sure to use all the tools at your disposal, and join forces with the cosmic by putting your faith in the Principal Project Pundit.
[1] A Yagna is a ritual sacred fire sacrifice common during Hindu festivals. Picture: Cliffydcw, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons