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'good' and 'bad' are subjective terms. The problem with most technical people are they look only at what's the best solution from a technical perspective, not what is most cost effective, or what can actually be accomplished from a political perspective, or what's realistic given resource constraints.
Often programmers, analysts and other more technical people are fairly poor at looking at the larger picture, which often includes a less than perfect solution from a pure-technical perspective. To those people, PMs and other management are 'useless' when in reality management and the programmer or analyst simply have very different goals.
The principals of project management cover all industries. PMs don't need to be experts in the field to manage the project. I don't need to know how to code in order to manage an IT project.
Sounds like the IT workers who have knowledge are led by an idiot or a dummy who just has the position by a dumb luck or having connection with the big boss.
Sounds like the IT workers who have knowledge are led by an idiot or a dummy who just has the position by a dumb luck or having connection with the big boss.
No. The IT folks are the experts on the technology and they run that themselves. I run the PROJECT. There is more to a project that the building of the tech.
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?
Maybe your people, but as someone who was a PM for a number of years on multimillion dollar IT projects I can rebut in general.
90% of what a PM does is communication. Or it should be. Managing time, scope and cost.
A good PM keeps things on track, manages the project and not the team, removes roadblocks, and reports up so that individuals on the team spend less time getting interrupted. Your company should teach your PMs the concept of servant leadership.
No. The IT folks are the experts on the technology and they run that themselves. I run the PROJECT. There is more to a project that the building of the tech.
Exactly. For complex IT projects, if not managed it may run over budget, over time, or not produce the desired results.
A small project can be self-managed (like upgrading a system.)
A large project with many interconnected deliverables and multiple departments involved is begging for disaster without a PM.
If something runs late the first thing a subject matter expert on the team does is to shut down communication and work harder. This tends to frustrate management. It’s the PM’s job to understand the impact and communicate it to the stakeholders.
What kind of project managers? PMs with PMP certification and proper training are tremendous assets to any field or company. It just depends on what you seek out of them.
PMP is great for learning the foundation, but when I got my PMs certified I ended up firing the first guy who passed because while he knew the details he couldn’t communicate well or manage expectations.
Exactly. For complex IT projects, if not managed it may run over budget, over time, or not produce the desired results.
A small project can be self-managed (like upgrading a system.)
A large project with many interconnected deliverables and multiple departments involved is begging for disaster without a PM.
If something runs late the first thing a subject matter expert on the team does is to shut down communication and work harder. This tends to frustrate management. It’s the PM’s job to understand the impact and communicate it to the stakeholders.
We did have a massive project that was PM'd by an outside consultant who flew in Monday and flew out Friday. He was excellent - former Marine colonel, executive at firms larger than we are, etc.
We did have a massive project that was PM'd by an outside consultant who flew in Monday and flew out Friday. He was excellent - former Marine colonel, executive at firms larger than we are, etc.
So it sounds as though your internal people aren’t trained or a good fit.
Often in big companies people “fall” into PM because they don’t have the subject matter expertise or skills for product or technology jobs, not because they are good PMs.
So it sounds as though your internal people aren’t trained or a good fit.
Often in big companies people “fall” into PM because they don’t have the subject matter expertise or skills for product or technology jobs, not because they are good PMs.
Folks don't get it, huh? Being a developer and being a project manager are TWO DIFFERENT skill sets.
A great developer could falter at delivering the ENTIRE project. The code may be great, but the scheduling, cost management, procurements, risk management, hiring resources, etc may all falter.
As a developer, do you want to deal with all that stuff or do you just want to do your code?
As a PM, I have no interest in being a developer. It's not that I couldn't do it. I'm just not interested in that focus area.
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