Project Management inside Kauravas clan

I have to deal with a lot of people at work. Manage complex programs with lot of moving parts.

There are approaches to managing this work which is focused on developing solutions to solve modern problems. Used to be called waterfall way of developing solutions few years ago and then things changed.

As technology started playing an unusually large part in shaping the future of how we go about our lives so came new jargon.

The software makers adopted a way of managing new work under a philosophy called Agile. Therefore other businesses in part to emulate their tech brethren also jumped ship ditching the waterfalls and went the way of hiring Release Train Engineers (people who have no idea of how to run a locomotive) and Scrum Masters.

Anyway folks in the biz will catch my drift. It is basically lot of mumbo jumbo which rarely provides the touted value, but looks sexy in marketing collateral or in board rooms across America. We are an agile organization they claim.

So as I am known to do I started my day dreaming of the myth of Mahabharata. Ancient tales told to us as children growing up in India. Some outside India also know about it.

What was life like in the day when there was no Agile development? Would things have turned out differently if say King Kuru had planned his life better? You see these Kauravas was a brotherhood (at least half brothers) totaling a 100. They were apparently the bad dudes.

They got into a major fight with their first cousins which totaled five brothers. These five bros were called the Pandavas. That battle forms the thesis called Mahabharata.

Anytime anyone goes to war it is not good for anybody. Bloodshed aside it takes away from being productive and helping those that need help and showing a high growth or EBITDA.

So these Kaurav bros lived around 3,000 years ago and what is amazing is that these 100 bros were born to a blind dude called Dhritarashtra. So my first quesiton is - how does a blind dude get around to procreating so much?

One might say he had nothing better to do than have a go at it each night with his queen (apparently he had one quickie with another lady but otherwise Gandhari holds the Guinness record for most offspring from one man) and who was gonna argue with him? He was king. And the queen then went off and kept cranking these - what became Kauravas out like some assembly line.

The oldest of these 100 bros was a guy called Duryodhana. He was mean and had a huge ego and steeped in avarice.

He also had some besties with whom he plots to do away with his cousins. He does so because he is generally mad at them for being one up on him at some social event.

Now this leads to a Vegas style poker match and the Pandavas also bet their wife (yeah they shared a wife) on the table. Then some Bollywood masala music later they lose everything and it results in an all out war.

Cut to some WWE style activity on the battlefields of what is now northern India accompanied by chariots and some serious metal hardware the situation became serious. Each day resulted in casualties for both sides. Play by play was available to the owners boxes too.

But in all this I wonder if Agile project management might have caused a better outcome for either side.

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