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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.
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.
Nonsense. The matrix is a ploy to give upper management a way to dodge blame for their failures in making the hard decisions.
Please define story. It's been a while, but for me the average IT project went like this.
1. Business problem recognized and defined.
2. Initial investigation into requirements - how many programs what do they do
3. High level specifications written.
4. Detailed specifications written.
5. Schedule set up for coding, unit testing and system testing
6. Coding
7. Set up test plan after coding because only after coding do you know what you want to look for.
8. Unit testing
9. System testing
10. In mainframe shops, I would strongly recommend Silk Test with parallel execution and expected results comparisons.
11. In UNIX/Linux shops there are utilities right in the operating system that will compare files in detail.
Of course this assumes that a parallel system exists with sufficient data to simulate real world processing.
That’s not how agile works. That’s waterfall.
I’ve been in software dev for 17 years. A good PM/ Scrum Master is worth his/her weight in gold. One caveat I would like to add— I thoroughly believe PMs should have had some role on an IT project in the past other than being a PM. Be it a dev, QA, BA, etc.
I think it's interesting how many are answering only from a software perspective. Being a PM is much larger and broader than just software. I'd say software is only a part of most projects, and none at all in many others.
I’ve been in software dev for 17 years. A good PM/ Scrum Master is worth his/her weight in gold. One caveat I would like to add— I thoroughly believe PMs should have had some role on an IT project in the past other than being a PM. Be it a dev, QA, BA, etc.
But this applies to all things in all cases. I was a better software developer because I was a management consultant for many years beforehand. I was a better PM because I was a software developer for many years beforehand.
What's really remarkable, though, is how little industry values these advantages. The extent and severity of age discrimination makes really clear that the advantages you and I are referring to are illusory - it may make sense that there would be advantages but industry has made it clear that such advantages, if they exist, aren't worth the detriments companies perceive in hiring workers over 50.
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?
I understand your frustration. I do data science and python programming though. From the view of hard data analysis, the mid-level managers are more likely to be (1) laid off and (2) replaced by automation. Many companies are choosing not to backfill laid-off mid-level managers, and a corporate recruiter told me non-technical mid-level managers are among the hardest "IT" workers to place. By contrast, data scientists with deep skills in applied statistics, ETL database programming, Python, R, Java, Matlab, SAS, etc. are in ridiculously high demand.
Just go into data science and write your own ticket. The "Bill Lumberg" style of mid-level management is being automated out of existence and very hard to place these days. Ideally, what they should do is go back to college and earn a legitimate, in-demand skill in IT so that they actually become useful - lol.
I understand your frustration. I do data science and python programming though. From the view of hard data analysis, the mid-level managers are more likely to be (1) laid off and (2) replaced by automation. Many companies are choosing not to backfill laid-off mid-level managers, and a corporate recruiter told me non-technical mid-level managers are among the hardest "IT" workers to place. By contrast, data scientists with deep skills in applied statistics, ETL database programming, Python, R, Java, Matlab, SAS, etc. are in ridiculously high demand.
Just go into data science and write your own ticket. The "Bill Lumberg" style of mid-level management is being automated out of existence and very hard to place these days. Ideally, what they should do is go back to college and earn a legitimate, in-demand skill in IT so that they actually become useful - lol.
The problem is there aren't that many people who can actually develop deep skills in statistics. What we're going to start seeing, because it is the current hot trend, is a lot of people calling themselves data scientists because they have enough Excel knowledge to impress most of management and wave their hands enough on the statistics to fool the rest.
The problem is there aren't that many people who can actually develop deep skills in statistics. What we're going to start seeing, because it is the current hot trend, is a lot of people calling themselves data scientists because they have enough Excel knowledge to impress most of management and wave their hands enough on the statistics to fool the rest.
That isn't the problem. Many people "can" develop deep skills in statistics by getting a PhD in it. The problem is people "choose" not to, and want to fast-track and not put in the hard work to develop those deep skills (getting a PhD). A good PhD-trained statistician/biostatistician has endless opportunities because they don't need to fake anything; they know their trade.
The problem is there aren't that many people who can actually develop deep skills in statistics. What we're going to start seeing, because it is the current hot trend, is a lot of people calling themselves data scientists because they have enough Excel knowledge to impress most of management and wave their hands enough on the statistics to fool the rest.
Heh. Our senior VP (Fortune 500 company) has a side gig teaching statistics at UCLA. He can spot hand-waving at a 1000 feet, number-fudging at twice that distance. I've seen exactly one guy try to BS his way out of a corner in front of him. It wasn't pretty.
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