I think there is one thing messing here. McDonald brothers had no problems running their stands, they had a problem cloning it.

Consulting companies usually even have nothing to clone. There is nothing bad in the system (or even "methodology") if this is something that allows you to get consistent results.

Peopleware or Joel's advices also creates a methodology - how to handle people with brains and Operation Manuals proven to be a wrong way to do this.

Basically this is well-know business problem - you either working IN business (writing code, designing etc.) or ON business - creating a system to reproduce results. And very usual mistake is to forget to work ON business.

-- Anonymous, January 20, 2001

Answers

Firstly, a commment to Joel's article.

Joel's piece on is an inspiration. I have this exact problem where I work, where we have all that RUP stuff and then we have people doing real work, but need strong and pragmatic guidance to improve overall deliverable quality. My job is to help wade through the minefield of methodologies and CASE tools and myriad of application servers and find out what fits our situation at ICON Medialab best. Sometimes I'm inclined to think that it's easy to become a RUP evangelist because all those boxes and arrows look so pretty. But it's not the be all and end all, the RUP revision for 2000 is only now just acknowledging the vital importance of user-centred design but still have not integrated it into the main workflows. Hmm. As a result, my 2 pesetas' worth of advice is to support Joel's comments. Perhaps Joel we may work together one day, I like the way you think...

And to comment on Roman's comment*, yes you're right it was the McDonalds brothers who had difficulty franchising, or more to the point, they simply didn't want to. It was Kronkite (heck, I can't remember the third guys' name) that built the franchising part. None of this affects the essence of Joel's piece though I think...

* since you can't seem to comment on a comment here... JOEL have you seen the piece of magic called JIVE which is 100% java and 100% free/open source. It's one impressive little puppy... pluggable look and feel, the works.

Julian.weblogs.com

-- Anonymous, January 20, 2001

The McDonalds guy was, I think, Ray Kroc.

-- Anonymous, January 24, 2001