Member-only story
The PowerPoint Industrial Complex
It’s a story of entropy, clip art, lurid transitions, and managerial busywork.
I’m old enough to remember when we had requirements specifications, carefully crafted documents that detailed what, exactly, a piece of software was actually supposed to do.
Quite a novel thought these days, I think you’ll agree¹.
If you’re under 30 then you’ll probably wonder what I’m talking about.
It was a truly great system. You knew exactly what you had to do and, more importantly, those requirements were all laboriously recorded, written down, set in stone (well, metaphorically anyway) such that at the end of the day you could hold the document right out there, right in front of the customer, and say, “Well, this is what you asked for, so this is what we delivered.”
Strange, I hear you all think, accountability? No way! But hey, way!
Unfortunately, primarily as the result of the whole agile fiasco² and its associated non-technical “consultant” evangelists, requirements have all but disappeared in the modern Grand Game, being replaced by a haphazard blindfold treasure hunt, performed with both hands tied behind your back, in a howling gale. Next to a cliff.
However, agile isn’t entirely to blame. Yes, I actually said that. There is something else…
