Parnas on software project management

From Software Fundamentals. Collected Papers by David L. Parnas page 604

One of Mills’s most important lessons had to do with the difference between management and engineering. He did not try to tell us how to make unmanageable projects manageable. He showed us how to make projects manageable. He understood that only well-designed and well-documented projects could be managed properly; he taught us how to design products in ways that made management easier. Today, when so many papers discuss software engineering as if the problem was simply project management, I miss Harlan Mills.