In Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef, Joel derides the least common denominator effect of formal methodologies:

Some things need talent to do really well. It's hard to scale talent. One way people try to scale talent is by having the talent create rules for the untalented to follow. The quality of the resulting product is very low.

You can see the exact same story playing out in IT consulting. How many times have you heard this story?

Mike was unhappy. He had hired a huge company of IT consultants to build The System. The IT consultants he hired were incompetents who kept talking about "The Methodology" and who spent millions of dollars and had failed to produce a single thing.

Luckily, Mike found a youthful programmer who was really smart and talented. The youthful programmer built his whole system in one day for $20 and pizza. Mike was overjoyed. He recommended the youthful programmer to all his friends.

Youthful Programmer starts raking in the money. Soon, he has more work than he can handle, so he hires a bunch of people to help him. The good people want too many stock options, so he decides to hire even younger programmers right out of college and "train them" with a 6 week course.

The trouble is that the "training" doesn't really produce consistent results, so Youthful Programmer starts creating rules and procedures that are meant to make more consistent results. Over the years, the rule book grows and grows. Soon it's a six-volume manual called The Methodology.

After a few dozen years, Youthful Programmer is now a Huge Incompetent IT Consultant with a capital-M-methodology and a lot of people who blindly obey the Methodology, even when it doesn't seem to be working, because they have no bloody idea whatsoever what else to do, and they're not really talented programmers – they're just well-meaning Poli Sci majors who attended the six-week course.

And Newly Huge Incompetent IT Consultant starts messing up. Their customers are unhappy. And another upstart talented programmer comes and takes away all their business, and the cycle begins anew.

What's the moral of the story? Beware of Methodologies. They are a great way to bring everyone up to a dismal, but passable, level of performance, but at the same time, [Methodologies] are aggravating to more talented people who chafe at the restrictions that are placed on them. It's pretty obvious to me that a talented chef is not going to be happy making burgers at McDonald's, precisely because of McDonald's rules. So why do IT consultants brag so much about their methodologies?