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The Heilmeier Catechism

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Re: The Heilmeier Catechism

#21

Post by exmadscientist »

coderintherye wrote: post #13
throwoutway wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the cult of professional administration?

Not GP, but for me the phrase is referring to the idea that everything needs to be professionally administered like an enterprise business (e.g. government, colleges, etc.) with organizational structures that reflect that. It typically values process and procedure over curiosity and innovation.

I was more talking about the cultists themselves, and what sort of person becomes a professional administrator (hint: very few have ever actually directly built or accomplished anything more complicated than assembling a piece of IKEA furniture, and most of them even have to subcontract that). The collective noun for cultists is cult, hence my words.

Their collective delusion is that a business or other effort can be administered without actually understanding what it is and does. This is lethal to the business.

That said, an actually good, down-to-earth professional administrator is worth their weight in platinum. These types are very, very rare.

Re: The Heilmeier Catechism

#22

Post by gumby »

kwijybo wrote: post #20
gumby wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cultural plague in pretty much all activity these days. Even in the age of memes, influencers, and user-generated content, everything has been professionalized, Professional sports has overwhelmed real amateur leagues. The Music Industry has displaced a lot of just getting together and singing badly. Wedding planners, summer gap year planners, even professional Christmas tree decorators. There are few roads…

> delivered frozen by CISCO. I think you mean Sysco. CISCO sell routers, Sysco sells food

Yes, brain fart. Thanks

Re: The Heilmeier Catechism

#23

Post by jonjacky »

iniekaas wrote: post #3

I’ve been using the catechism in everything I write throughout my PhD. It’s real a catechism for academia, it’s all about answering these questions in one way or another. I just start with it and start adding bullet points to answer these questions, then I put more bullet points and expand in them, and so on until I have enough material. Then I map it to each section of w/e document I am writing. It’s been one of the…

Olin Shivers' dissertation advice is also very short and pointful:

https://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/diss-advice.html

Re: The Heilmeier Catechism

#24

Post by Communitivity »

This and the W6H are what I tell any new developer to include when briefing their efforts to clients or management.

The W6H overlaps the Heilmeier Catechism some:

  - Who:  Who will perform the work?
  - What: What work will be performed?
  - Where: Where will the work be performed? Is the env. suitable or are purchases needed? If purchases, what?  
  - Why: Why are you/we the people to perform this work? Why does this work need to be performed? Why are we not using an off-the-shelf solution (this is where you can present an Analysis of Alternatives and/or Gap Analysis)?
  - When: When will the work start? When is it expected to end? When is it needed and what is it needed by?
  - Which: Which customer are you performing the work for?
  - How: What are your planned methods, at a highlevel, and reasoning behind those choices?
The original source for the above is Aristotle, but thanks to Wikipedia [1] I've always thought the way I use them to more match Hermagoras of Temnos, as quoted in pseudo-Augustine's De Rhetorica[2]:

Quis, quid, quando, ubi, cur, quem ad modum, quibus adminiculis.[3] (Who, what, when, where, why, in what way, by what means)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws

[2] Cecil W. Wooten, George Alexander Kennedy, eds., The orator in action and theory in Greece and Rome, 2001. ISBN 90-04-12213-3, p. 36.

[3] Robertson, D.W. Jr (1946). "A Note on the Classical Origin of "Circumstances" in the Medieval Confessional". Studies in Philology. 43 (1): 6–14. JSTOR 4172741.

Re: The Heilmeier Catechism

#25

Post by xpe »

rangersanger wrote: post #2

I hadn’t seen this before and I’m 100% going to steal it and use it for my next product/feature/business case pitch. At least as a start to prove value to myself. I’m fully aware of the utility of jargon in writing a business case, it lets me skip over the difficult, the warts, and the questionable. I wonder if there’s a correlation between failed projects and how jargon heavy the initiation is? I also really like th…

> I’m fully aware of the utility of jargon in writing a business case, it lets me skip over the difficult, the warts, and the questionable. I wonder if there’s a correlation between failed projects and how jargon heavy the initiation is?

I'll say this, based on my experience working at a particularly dysfunctional organization: in these kinds of environments, skipping over the most obvious questions seems to be the norm. Most of the time, when I was exposed to a new project, the explanation gave almost minimal explanation about fundamentals such as:

1. What is the time scale of the project? (e.g. weeks? (probably not), months? (that would be a moonshot), about a year? (maybe...), many years (yikes!))

2. What phase is the project in? (e.g. conceptualization, technical design, implementation, etc)

3. What specific teams and people are working on the project? Who is in charge? What kind of leadership will they offer? (e.g. selling the project up the ladder, project-level, technical, etc) ...

Also, the following questions were usually in play:

4. Where can I go read about the project details?

5. Why does it seem that each person who hears about the project has a very different idea of what it is supposed to do?

6. Wasn't there a previous version of this project? What was it called again? Did it ever launch? Why didn't it ever go anywhere?

Re: The Heilmeier Catechism

#27

Post by no_identd »

Communitivity wrote: post #24

This and the W6H are what I tell any new developer to include when briefing their efforts to clients or management. The W6H overlaps the Heilmeier Catechism some: - Who: Who will perform the work? - What: What work will be performed? - Where: Where will the work be performed? Is the env. suitable or are purchases needed? If purchases, what? - Why: Why are you/we the people to perform this work? Why does this work nee…

Here's one more highly relevant citation into which I eventually stumbled, which covers additional details about the W6H:

https://www.academia.edu/29682686/The_Roots_of_News_in_Journ... Stamenković, Gordana — "The Roots of News in Journalism.", Unpublished Manuscript, 2016.

Plus additional see also, the recent Hacker News thread on How To improve one's Technical Writing, the link to which I'll ninja-edit-insert here in a second:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31859040#31877184

In my opinion, historically, the decisions which led to IBM's Zachman Framework only utilizing W5H(=6 questions) instead of W6H (=7 questions) really screwed us all over by whole freightloads more than almost anyone realizes as it has horribly miscalibrated more societal systems(') environments with ground truth biasing so extensively that it has started to slip into recursive, some sort of eldritch generalization of xkcd's Citogenesis cycle.

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