You must log in or register to comment.
A good project manager is worth their weight in gold. Large scale projects are complex and have lots of moving parts. Someone who understands this and is good at keeping all the “parts” moving while heading off any potential issues is extremely valuable.
The problem is that often the people doing the hiring don’t know what it takes to run a large project, much less what good project management looks like. They just hire some idiot with an agile certification whose only skill is moving items around a kanban board in a way that gives the illusion that progress is being made.
Dependencies! Deliverables! Blockers!
Put me in coach, I’m ready!
Circle back, take this offline, T-shirt size
My biggest ask is whether or not we can parking lot this.
“Have you looked at the gantt chart? Are you on schedule?”
- Project Manager (keeps everything on their personal drive and somehow expects everyone to have access to it)
“The fuck is a gantt chart? I handle piss all day long”
- Me (smelling of piss and not giving a shit about whatever that is)
Yeah, as a General Foreman in construction I would be up to my eyeballs in nonsense without my PM.
This is the correct take.
Another problem is when management somehow manages to make a simple project into a crazy complex project.
I see two drivers of this: General empire building, more headcount under me == I am more important
Trying to use unvetted, low quality labor to do something being their abilities and trying to make it up with volume because corporate leadership declared it should be possible and anyone who says otherwise it’s a bad fit for the company.
This and the following thread are great guidelines for would-be PMs.
Personally, however, I will avoid the role for the rest of my life, because it’s too much work.
Our project managers are salespeople, they over promise our capabilities, mostly because they don’t even know what we can do, and disappear the moment a contract is signed. Leaving it up to the employees who actually do the work to meet impossible expectations.
There’s been a few good project managers who get involved and check in on things, but there’s only been one (out of a dozen+ or so) in my 7 years working here who’s actually asked us what we can do and how long things take before taking in contacts. I’m sure they, or at least that kind of approach, will not last very long.
Man, gotta disagree here. There are deadweights under every job title. Had a pm that literally carried the team on her back, while simultaneously shielding us from bullshit from on high.
Unfortunately, you’re right about as much as the original meme is. At my current gig, I’ve worked with half a dozen PMs, and while the majority of them were (seemingly) sweet and nice people, at least half of them would struggle to pour piss out of a boot if you wrote instructions on the heel. Even with project templates and runbooks, we still regularly had to clean up after them because they didn’t do part of the project or expected us to work on stuff that wasn’t marked as being live yet.
I’ve definitely seen both extremes. It’s insane the difference a good PM makes, but they’re rare because of how much pressure they have to handle. It’s an ungrateful job.
Acceptable ones aren’t too rare, that is, ones that don’t have negative productivity – depending on the industry and company politics, in some places it’s BS all the way down. Good ones are rare and stellar ones are unicorns as it’s a dual mastery thing: You have to be good at both the technical aspects, as well as the people aspect, and neither of those two can be mere talent, it needs to be talent and education. Judging by Alice Cecile, being a systems ecologist is the right overall qualification.
Yeah, my team actually has a mix of great, good, and replacement level PMs. The bad ones either get let go or moved elsewhere. It helps that we tend to draw them from the roles that would be on projects they’d manage and seem to compensate them well enough that we retain all the good ones.
If an org can’t find good PMs, the org needs to create them and pay them enough that they stick in the role. It’s not easy, but it’s not rocket science.
Nail on the head there. So many PMs are either outside the industry entirely or pulled from completely unrelated projects and it’s just a disaster.
There are definitely some amazing PMs, but I’ve met way more terrible PMs who don’t know shit about fuck and don’t care to learn than good PMs.
You say that until the first time you join a team with multiple projects to accomplish and zero project or program management. It sucks. Badly.
I pine for very excellent PMs I’ve known.
I had a manager once with a powerful knack for hiring great ones. The only problem was that each and every one of them got poached for upper management in the business.
The current PM where I work:
- cannot figure out audio settings for teams
- cannot understand microphone feedback loops
- cannot ask you your status on a task without giving just enough time for you to think it’s your turn to speak only to then start speaking again the moment you start explaining your status
- cannot understand that an explanation for the status of a task can apply to multiple similar tasks
- always second guesses decisions
Their only actual job as far as I can tell is to tell the suits what they want to hear in their fucked up little business language. But I haven’t seen that, so maybe they’re terrible at that as well.
It feels like they memorized and religiously practice the CIA’s handbook for field sabotage.
Everytime project managers come up the threads are full of people say BUTTTTT THE GOOOOODDD ONES!!!
My experience is exactly like yours. They only exist because most executives are so detached from the realities of the business they require a full time person to turn their platitudes into something resembling reality.
If you are an engineer and you cant schedule a meeting or ping someone on slack, just get another job. We dont need to invent another soulless mindnumbing and pointless profession because you are too lazy to use a kanban board.
If you are an executive or leadership and you can’t communicate with your team even though the primary role of executives is communicating plans, then maybe leadership isn’t for you.
Its that simple. We could end the suffering of millions if not billions of people by outlawing 3 careers. Project managers, sales, and marketing. Pulling off the bandaid will hurt, but humanity will be better for it.
They’re only useless if they legitimately suck at their job or don’t give a fuck.
A good project manager will go a long way to keeping things running smoothly.
Project managers keep me from committing acts of arson to our issue management system lmao
If a project appears as if it doesn’t need a project manager, the project manager is probably doing a great job
The best PM I ever had was playing zone defense and just deflecting every possible thing that could disrupt the creative team. Let us cook for more than a sprint.
Bad ones are constantly coming up with new requests, mid-sprint adds, don’t really have answers, and create more blockers than they resolve.
Ah ha ha ha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah. Oh wait, you’re serious!?? ornery_chemist @mander.xyz English On the other hand a manager willing to yell at/stonewall the MBAs when they deliberately lie about misinterpret your recommendations and timelines is a godsend.
Who are you even replying to? What is this comment about?
It looks like you’re both laughing at @HalfSalesman@lemm.ee but also quoting a different comment supporting his stance.
He’s having a stroke or something
Fixed it.
how?
Now it fills vertical screens completely!
I don’t like you.
fds = fuhhh daehhh shihhh = don’t do it
A Project Manager is someone who thinks nine women can deliver a baby in one month.
“Hellen, you were supposed to only do the left arm! What am I supposed to do with a whole baby!?”
A good PM will herd all the cats and attend all the meetings you don’t want to. They’re worth their weight in gold.
A bad PM will do none of the above and constantly drag you in to fight their fires. They’re worth their weight in, well, you know.
Note I’ve seen the “protecting me from a meeting” backfire so hard.
One time for lack of headcount I did a bit of double duty as project manager including executive meetings. Then management found a project manager and instead of knocking out my part of those meetings in like 5 minutes, I suddenly had generally hour long prep meetings so my new project manager would be confident enough to engage in whatever random topic the execs tended to go into. After a quarter they demanded I swap back in to do the meetings instead, which I was happy to do.
Also, those meetings are my best chance to cut through some confusion so I don’t end up with a mess of crap in the tracker.
As a PM who tries to not waste anyone’s time, thank you. I’ve had pushback before from people who don’t like to do the talking, but I would only call that person forward if it’s going to prevent a ton of headaches all around. Sometimes it’s difficult to explain that. Otherwise I have no problem being the punching bag on stage. It’s my job.
project managers (or any types of managers/admins) who are forces of nature can really drive things forward. this person talks about the useless kind of manager which often tries to interject him/her self in everything slowing things down. They act like this mostly because otherwise they would be useless as that is their only skill and they got the position through mix of luck and network.
I’ve literally always described my job as babysitting
I like ‘herding cats’, but babysitting is quite accurate.
Project managers are essential for larger projects…
Please tell us what “essential things” they do.
Keep everyone, and I mean everyone including senior management and directors, on task, on track, and all pointing in the same direction.
Good ones keep scope creep in check, and make sure decisions made last week are adhered to today.
The problem is there are a lot of not great PM’s, and a lot of management that run roughshod over PM’s.
I think I might be a project manager. it’s not my job description, but a good amount of my time is spent coordinating client needs (software), company needs (money), management needs (reassurance) and developer needs (concise and complete design, and decisionmaking).
Normally there are 6 software projects on the go at any one time, all in various stages of production that I need to keep ticking over to prevent a backlog or a gap in work for the Devs.
I’m fortunate that my only supervisor is the owner of the company and he now trusts me enough to say “Do whatever gets the job done” and so I don’t get micromanaged or roadblocked on decisionmaking. I choose the Devs, the architecture, the design, the timeline, and the budget. I take a dictatorial attitude to the clients to force their nebulous and sometimes stupid ideas into a clean, detailed, and clearly defined box long before the Devs ever hear of it. I take a very hands-off approach with the Devs, giving them plenty of support, asking for their advice, accepting their limitations and a very quick yes/no/alt when they have questions or recommendations. I don’t micromanage them, but I do have a system that helps me identify problems with the delivery pipeline. They also know I’m excruciatingly thorough in my testing so between their own testing and mine, very few bugs make it to production.
As for my manager, he pops his head in maybe twice a week to give me updates on stuff but otherwise leaves me alone, and I take a very firm line with all of the other senior management and clients when it comes to adhering to the project development procedure, which I wrote. I have no fear of telling people no, or telling them that we stick to the procedure or no work commences. Maybe I’ll get fired for being a hardass to mgmt one day, but it’s been 4 years and I don’t think I will.
I keep detailed track of every involved party, every task, event, meeting, test and correspondence between me and any other involved person, but they don’t know that.
And if anything goes wrong with the project, it’s my fault. I’d never blame the Devs for not for seeing something that I should have foreseen, and I’d never blame the client for not providing information that I should have asked for and verified.
Sounds like you are a product manager / project manager! :D
Sounds like a pretty small company. But imagine that but with thousands of people who need to be aligned
I don’t have a project manager and shit can’t get done because I don’t have the authority to get other people to do their job but I’m still held accountable for its progress. My direct manager thinks I’m supposed to do it even though it’s not in my job title. I’m thinking of finding another job.
What some PMs don’t understand is they don’t lead the team but instead they should be supporting the team so that the job gets done on time. Shuffle around resources, reverse manage upper management, protect the team from being derailed etc.
This is in construction, though, and I’ve no idea about how the tech industry works.
This is my expereince, a good PM manages expectations and pushes back on the builder from trying to forge ahead with construction when the staging isnt right or areas arent ready, instead of being yes men and cracking the whip to make tradies get things done to appease their superiors. And they will negotiate cross-trade eith other PM’s or tradies to see what arrangements will make mutliple parties happy when there are clashes and try keep things uninterrupted so everyone can keep ticking away at their own tasks.
People who think managers are useless have either likely only worked for good ones or bad ones. Good ones make it look so easy it looks like they do nothing.
Quite often when I’m managing the work floor if we have a good week I have almost nothing to do on fridays. Sometimes the staff make comments about it and I always say the same thing “If I’m scrambling on Friday, it means I fucked up on Wednesday and we’re all going to have a shitty Monday.”
This may come as a surprise to some, but project managers exist outside of software as well.
Hold up. Projects exist outside of software?
That was my title at the prototyping shop I worked for. Sounded more white collar than “foreman”.
deleted by creator
