The Arbitrary Manifesto

By creating very specific, rigid and arbitrary systems and processes we can obfuscate the software development life-cycle into charts and meetings, help clients feel like they are involved, and create thousands of middle management jobs.

One size fits all over fluidity

Rigid time-boxes and schedules over flexibility

Overly communicating over trusting people

Certifications over learning and collaborating

By following the tenets on the left you will be able to give the illusion of work and progress to the people above you on the chain, and beat the people below you into submission.

In all things you must follow this process:

Arbitrarily make a decision, aggressively and rigidly hold everything to that standard.

We recommend the following decisions be made:

1. Decide on an arbitrary time-box in which work will be completed. The standard should be two weeks. All other schedules and decisions will revolve around this time-box.
2. Decide on a scale that you can use to judge all work. The standard should be Fibonacci. At the beginning of your decided on time-box you will allow your team members to arbitrarily decide where on the scale their task will lie. You must hold that person to this estimate no matter what.
   • Bonus points if you call this ranking meeting something fun and exciting such as "Planning Poker".
3. Decide on and implement a series of jargon and acronyms. This will set you and other middle people apart, and give you a sense of value. It is especially recommended that you change commonly used words into jargon as well. Example: Instead of "meeting", which is a boring and overly used word, using the word "ceremony" or even "event". This will make everything sound very exciting and new. Keeping your team members very motivated.
4. Decide on and rigidly use a commercial task system. It is very important that you purchase and religiously use a system to create and manage tasks. By using a prebuilt solution you get to not only save time and money on development costs, but you get to use that companies own decisions in your work pipeline.

These decisions are vital to your success as a corporate middle person. No matter what happens you must hold everyone to these decisions. It is recommended that you add more meetings and formal processes to make that happen.

1. The number one goal is to leave a paper trail of everything.
2. We like when new requirements are added, so long as they are properly documented, ranked, and prioritized.
3. The value and impact of any work can only be shown using charts and numbers.
4. Especially now with remote work being so common it is vitally important that all discussions and decisions happen in a scheduled meeting, or in an email thread.
5. Under no circumstances are you supposed to contribute to the work being done by your team. Especially if you used to be a developer yourself. You are a leader, not a sheep.
6. The best team members are the ones who complete not only the most tasks, but more importantly, the most points during your time-box.
7. All tasks must be forced to fit into the time-box that was decided on. Regardless of possible size or complexity.
8. Completion of tasks is the primary measure of progress.
9. Maximizing the amount of work documented is essential to proving how much work is being done.
10. By adding more meetings you increase team unity and focus. This gives you the opportunity to further entrench the decisions that have been made.
11. Strict adherence to what was initially decided on is how progress is made. Trust the process.
12. Rigidity to these principles helps you cut through the rough oceans of uncertainty.