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Old 04-28-2019, 08:29 AM
 
Location: TN/NC
34,944 posts, read 31,079,407 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tonyafd View Post
People who supervise IT people with no IT experience are dangerous. They establish deadlines with no thought as to how much coding is involved. Have any of you been asked how long do you think that this will take ten minutes after they present you with a project? Proper requirement analysis takes a couple of hours even it it is a single program being written.
The PMs don't manage anyone, yet they act like they are your direct boss. It's not about collaboration - they dictate.
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Old 04-28-2019, 08:57 AM
 
14,394 posts, read 11,169,836 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by charlygal View Post
You described waterfall project management. Many companies are moving to Agile, which is an iterative methodology.

A story is just a simple piece of the overall coding work. It simplifies the understanding of the task. It's written in the "As a," "I want," "so that" format that can easily be understood by all parties including the end user.

For instance, "As a financial analyst, I want Adobe Acrobat added to the system so that all my reports are available in PDF format."
A diagram might help explain as well.



User stories have a number of points associated with them. There are usually a certain # of points that can be handled in a 2 week sprint.
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Old 04-28-2019, 09:16 AM
 
13,395 posts, read 13,457,370 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by markjames68 View Post
A diagram might help explain as well.


User stories have a number of points associated with them. There are usually a certain # of points that can be handled in a 2 week sprint.
Also, the developers determine the number of points assigned to each individual story.

So, a sprint may have a target of 60 points. The team will determine how many stories they can fit in that sprint after sizing the individual stories.
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Old 04-28-2019, 09:36 AM
 
Location: Las Vegas
341 posts, read 291,613 times
Reputation: 990
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wellstone View Post
The worst one we had just wanted herself to look good to upper management and served no useful purpose.
This was the "PMP Certified" PM on the last project I was on. I actually went two layers above me at one point and officially requested she be removed from the project and replaced because her inability to manage projects had put the project into complete chaos and was creating substantial risk of failure. Unfortunately due to politics and the reporting structure she could not be removed, however my managers fully supported me and asked it I could work some magic in the background to get the bus out of the ditch and back on the road. Basically I had to step in myself and do politicing with all the people she pissed off to smooth things over and get the project back on track. What a joke I have to write code and also do PM on behalf of the PMP credentialed "PM".

Since she's still there for future projects (long story don't ask) I told my management that any of my projects she is assigned to, that needs to be included in the risk analysis for the project. In other words, her involvement in the project introduces risk, and that needs to be factored in and mitigated up front. Isn't it great to have PM's that not only can't manage projects, but actually introduce risk of project failure when they are involved?
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Old 04-28-2019, 12:05 PM
 
12,711 posts, read 8,929,449 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Serious Conversation View Post
The PMs don't manage anyone, yet they act like they are your direct boss. It's not about collaboration - they dictate.
This is the issue of why I don't like being a PM in a matrix structure. As far as management is concerned, the PM for a project is your boss for that project because the PM has responsibility for the project. Unless what they want is illegal, unethical, or unfunded, your direct boss should be supporting the PM. Unfortunately what happens is way too often it turns into a "who's the boss?" situation where nothing gets done.

Quote:
Originally Posted by luckydogg View Post
...
Since she's still there for future projects (long story don't ask) I told my management that any of my projects she is assigned to, that needs to be included in the risk analysis for the project. In other words, her involvement in the project introduces risk, and that needs to be factored in and mitigated up front. Isn't it great to have PM's that not only can't manage projects, but actually introduce risk of project failure when they are involved?
I've had that discussion with my management too. Frankly we have a couple where the risk of failure approaches 100% whenever they get involved in a technical project. They do ok with conventional construction work, but as soon as anything technically complex gets added in, forget it; not happening.
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Old 04-29-2019, 04:28 AM
bUU
 
Location: Florida
12,077 posts, read 10,679,221 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Serious Conversation View Post
The PMs don't manage anyone, yet they act like they are your direct boss. It's not about collaboration - they dictate.
I have found that practically no one has any idea what "collaboration" means. Software developers, especially, are often so caught up in the technology that they think "collaboration" means whatever supports them delivering the software that they want to deliver how they want to deliver it.

The reality is that "collaboration" means (in that context), respecting the product team, marketing and sales to define what software should be delivered, what it should do, and how the user should feel about working with the software; while the product team, marketing and sales respecting the software developers to define the technologies to be employed and implement the software so it satisfies the requirements that the product team, marketing and sales defined.

I've never seen a market researcher second guess a software developer's decision to use a specific algorithm or rely on a certain library or employ a particular ui framework, but I've seen software developers regularly second guess how the customer features are prioritized, regularly grumble about requirements for compatibility with what users already have, etc.

Collaboration is supposed to be an exercise in every discipline bringing their specific expertise to the table to work together to find the best way to achieve the goal. Software developers, especially, seem to be tone deaf to their instinctive, knee-jerk disrespect for other disciplines.

Don't get me wrong. There's a good bit of blame to go around. markjames68 posted a graphic, above, that diagrams how agile product development is supposed to work. How many senior leadership teams have changed the way they manage the business to fit with agile? How many of them are still approving project plans that specify what will be delivered and when, rather than funding lean and agile development operations that proceed in priority order, delivering working software when it satisfies requirements rather than on a specific date (and therefore directing the kind of project manager actions that so many are complaining about in this thread)? How many product managers attend those every-two-week demos indicated in that graphic above?

Some do, I'm sure, but most are still viewing agile as something that the technology groups do. And I suspect contract software development is doing this better than other commercial software development operations. However, having been on both sides and as a third-party, I can say with a level of assurance that it is often the tech side that is off-target with how it works with the rest of the enterprise.
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Old 04-29-2019, 04:40 AM
 
3,882 posts, read 2,354,855 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tnff View Post
Unfortunately what happens is way too often it turns into a "who's the boss?" situation where nothing gets done.

Yes, that's the problem with giving everyone all these PM titles. They open up an Atlassian account and everyone's a PM of something, and any real problems can't be handled, they can only be documented because they have no authority to take any real actions. The matrix is another ploy just like handing out PM titles to everyone, to make people think they are actually the boss of something when they aren't at all. This is all to make the non-supervisory employees feel they are a boss of something.
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Old 04-29-2019, 06:43 AM
 
Location: TN/NC
34,944 posts, read 31,079,407 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tnff View Post
This is the issue of why I don't like being a PM in a matrix structure. As far as management is concerned, the PM for a project is your boss for that project because the PM has responsibility for the project. Unless what they want is illegal, unethical, or unfunded, your direct boss should be supporting the PM. Unfortunately what happens is way too often it turns into a "who's the boss?" situation where nothing gets done.
I was out Friday and the PM sent an email directly to account administration asking if I had submitted a ticket for the accounts, without even CCing me.

I can do this kind of thing and don't need someone constantly policing me. That's my problem.
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Old 04-29-2019, 07:08 AM
 
11,230 posts, read 9,243,847 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Serious Conversation View Post
I was out Friday and the PM sent an email directly to account administration asking if I had submitted a ticket for the accounts, without even CCing me.

I can do this kind of thing and don't need someone constantly policing me. That's my problem.
Well, that sounds like a clerical function. If you have a project manager that's focusing on clerical matters rather than scope schedule and resources and the completion of project tasks, then she's not doing project management.


Honestly, rather than throwing "project managers" at everything, I suspect just adding a competent department secretary would often solve a lot of problems. The difference in how smooth a department runs with a competent secretary, versus everybody trying to do those tasks themselves, is like night and day. Too bad current management fads have led to the abolishment of that position.
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Old 04-29-2019, 07:58 AM
 
5,462 posts, read 3,020,941 times
Reputation: 3271
Quote:
Originally Posted by Serious Conversation View Post
I work in IT, and I'm on several large, concurrent projects where we have PMs.

Each one of them, down to a person, acts like they're the boss of the analysts and engineers actually doing the work. I received a request from one of them this morning to create user accounts. My team doesn't handle that, and I was never informed of what type of accounts they needed. I get a nastygram back that "I'll take this to someone else if I need to," CCing other employees on my team who are no longer on the project. After all that, the vendor PM still didn't provide all the information required to create the accounts.

I was placed on a new project last week with a brand new PM who has never done this type of work before. He's a nice guy, but clearly in over his head and has no IT background. He's useless.

I have another project where the PM has been out sick for weeks/months and follows up on every single minor issue. She wants to another the status of minor support cases and other super granular data. She's not around enough to help, and being so granular is causing us to lose focus on the bigger picture.

Anyone else find these people to be damn near useless?
Managers are useful. They know how to project themselves. Which you or me dont have and which is why we claim we are stuck at doing meaningful work and complain they are useless.

Technically 1 technical person does the job, but its the PM who gets higher billing if you are customer facing.

Machine can do our jobs, but not a PM's job.

I have faced this in my company. I visit customers, delivery exceptional quality work, get more business, support contracts, but some PM comes and "manages" it. Just because he is able to project himself well within the company.
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