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I'm curious how your company holds the employee accountable to the PM when they work for a functional and get tasked by other PMs? That's been the big flaw in every matrix organization I've been is--the disconnect between responsibility, accountability, and authority.
This.
The companies who succeed with such an environment generally do so in spite of the matrix organization, not as a result of it.
The product owners ultimately own the tech product. The product owners sponsor/champion the project. Whatever they want happens. It's the product owners who can wield the big stick and can hold the IT employees accountable (via the Tech Manager) to give me what I need.
That's cool. My experience has been the opposite where the product owners take their wrath out on the PM who has no authority to fix the problem rather than on the functional who do. I watched many PMs get fired while the functional just keeps on doing nothing.
As a PMP, running two digital banking projects currently, I appreciate this thread. Giving me a chuckle in between Friday conference calls and wrap-up.
I bought into the self-organizing, no PM needed proselytizing of Agile before. Works great for internal, software product development where you’re continuously delivering against a product roadmap. Try it with a client and see how far you get without some oversight and high level view of all the moving parts of the project.
The project will never finish because the client thinks they can continue to make changes forever or devs/designers will wander off on their own pet projects or get pulled elsewhere at random. If the account executive is left to provide status, it will always turn into a sales pitch at the end. There are always additional asks for information or issues that come up periodically. It won’t get resolved in a 15 minute daily stand-up. Not against agile development at all, but development isn’t the only phase of a software implementation project.
I disagree. Project management on a large project can easily become a full time job. If you add managing people administratively to that (hiring, firing, performance reviews, interpersonal issues, etc., etc., etc.) you're now doing TWO full time jobs; which means you're not going to do the best possible of either job.
Obviously if you only have two employees and one small project the above doesn't apply, but I'm talking about the standard situation in medium and large companies where there's more work than can ever be done anyway.
I know, my experience is on very large projects. You are missing the point. Calling people who work out schedules, coordination of plans and resources, and who spend the days gathering status from others to put into a software tool aren't Project Managers. They are managers of their work area. An actual Project Manager is truly in charge of the project and everyone in it. You go to the doctor's office and there is the doctor and there are nurses. You have one doctor in charge of the patient who delegates to the nursing staff, but that doesn't cause the nurse function to be called a doctor. We need nurses and that's a full time job, but they aren't called doctors because that isn't a good job title of what they do.
They have job title inflation to attract talent to the job so it appears to be a promotion and that they are part of management when that isn't the case at all.
I know, my experience is on very large projects. You are missing the point. Calling people who work out schedules, coordination of plans and resources, and who spend the days gathering status from others to put into a software tool aren't Project Managers. They are managers of their work area. An actual Project Manager is truly in charge of the project and everyone in it. You go to the doctor's office and there is the doctor and there are nurses. You have one doctor in charge of the patient who delegates to the nursing staff, but that doesn't cause the nurse function to be called a doctor. We need nurses and that's a full time job, but they aren't called doctors because that isn't a good job title of what they do.
They have job title inflation to attract talent to the job so it appears to be a promotion and that they are part of management when that isn't the case at all.
You do know that your definition isn't the definition used by the ENTIRE industry, right? But hey, if you believe, it's correct, right?
There is no title inflation. I know where I stand in the chain of command. No, I do not have direct reports. I don't manage people. I manage the project work.
In your example, imagine a hospital. There are doctors and nurses. They have their jobs. Then there are hospital administrators who can tell the doctors and nurses what needs to be done. That administrator role would be the PM.
FYI, what you are referring to would be a project oriented organization. They exist. There is also legitimate project work going on in organizations with different structures.
You do know that your definition isn't the definition used by the ENTIRE industry, right? But hey, if you believe, it's correct, right?
There is no title inflation. I know where I stand in the chain of command. No, I do not have direct reports. I don't manage people. I manage the project work.
In your example, imagine a hospital. There are doctors and nurses. They have their jobs. Then there are hospital administrators who can tell the doctors and nurses what needs to be done. That administrator role would be the PM.
FYI, what you are referring to would be a project oriented organization. They exist. There is also legitimate project work going on in organizations with different structures.
Correct.
The term "Manager" has not been restricted to people with direct administrative reports for decades now.
The term "Project Manager" has been used for people who direct the work of a project, whether or not the team members report to them administratively, at least since the publication of The Mythical Man-Month in 1975.
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?
Apparently an IT PM is very different than a manufacturing PM. I can’t imagine trying to manage a $50M manufacturing project without a lead PM. My experience has been that unless you’ve been the person ultimately responsible for a major project, it’s very easy to see these people as near useless. Try it sometime and come back with your opinions.
Apparently an IT PM is very different than a manufacturing PM. I can’t imagine trying to manage a $50M manufacturing project without a lead PM. My experience has been that unless you’ve been the person ultimately responsible for a major project, it’s very easy to see these people as near useless. Try it sometime and come back with your opinions.
I think this recent popularity of the title, and surge of people seeking the certification leads people to question the importance of anything that they hear is a "big deal".
I don't imagine many critics of the PM role would be very interested in hearing some story about how the very first proto-PM role in Ford Motor Co. occurred about 100 years ago. I just know that I didn't understand a single thing my friend told me about his job. It's hard to see a purpose when you're outside of the discipline.
Also, many startups and even medium sized businesses may not have an immediate need for an in-house PM, so people who have worked only for small-medium sized businesses might not see a need for one. And they might be right.
At some point when automation has taken over many job roles then we don't need PMs anymore. Most IT jobs today don't really have a full-time PM running the projects. A lot of managers are PMs because they're the only ones that can negotiate and allocate the resources needed. A lot of PMs these days are just mediators, they get in between other managers and just work on an agreement between delivery dates and commitment. Now, a lot of these tasks has already been automated through IT workflow and automation software. So I believe in a few years or decade from now, there won't be any PMP in the IT delivery field. It's still necessary for software development but it's also becoming more streamlined where the lead software designer is the PM.
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