Slashdot Mirror
What Sci-Fi Movies Teach Us About Project Management Skills
Esther Schindler writes "It's certainly fun to pretend to find work inspiration from our favorite SF films. That's what Carol Pinchefsky does in two posts, one about positive business lessons you can take away from SF films (such as 'agile thinking can save many a project (and project manager) in a crisis' from Robocop and team motivation lessons from Buffy), and the other, 5 Project Management Horror Stories Found in Sci-Fi Movies, with examples of the impact of poor documentation on Captain America."
"We shall redouble our efforts"
The commander of Death Star 2 when Vader told him the Emperor was coming to inspect the project.
Don't let Khan near anything.
If it breeds, it can take over your ship.
Sleeping with the test proctor will let you beat the no-win scenario.
If you have a bad feeling about something, it's a trap.
And they launched Challenger when the solid-fuel booster O-rings were too cold to seat properly, over the objections of the engineers.
That's true, but what's even sadder is that those damn O-rings should've never even been there in the first place. The SRBs were meant to be a one piece monolithic design. However it was changed into a segmented multi piece O-ring design because pork had to be provided to Morton Thiokol at the insistence of the senator from Utah, who held the purse strings. (Thiokol, being in Utah, cannot ship a large one piece by ocean and could only build segmented ones shipped by rail)
The lesson here is, do not let managers into your project who have their own agendas that conflict with the main project's mission.
I've been on several projects where I fervently wished "dust off and nuke it from orbit" was a project management option. It is, after all, the only way to be sure.