Ignorance, Indifference

The split not share philosophy (or bias) of CM has an interesting side-effect: because tasks are assigned to different people, according to pre-defined roles, it is considered a Good Thing to ignore in detail what the others exactly do. There is no more incentive for them to tell, than for you to inquire. The result is called abstraction, whereas it is in fact often opacity.

Other contributors' (or colleagues') tasks are controlled only as Change Requests, which formally results in their being planned, assigned, and finally reported, and closed, but with the actual work and contents remaining invisible, its management proper left at the discretion of the implementors, as outside the CM process.

In the most degenerate cases, this ends up encouraging sheer incompetence: people sitting at (even so-called CCB) meetings, assigning resources to, or out-sourcing tasks without any real understanding of the work involved, of the technology, etc. The sociology of such a situation is best left to literature (e.g. Gogol's Revizor).

-- MarcGirod - 03 Feb 2007