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.
I would add to that: A lot of a good project manager’s job is shielding the team from bullshit from above.
You can push back on people randomly deciding that changes need to be made to the project, push back on requests for mandatory overtime or whatever, fight to expand the team when it needs to be expanded, intervene when someone “high up” is trying to single out some person on the team for blame, and so on and so forth. Even on projects where a lot of the organization can be done by the team itself (which is a lot of them), there’s a vital role just in having an advocate for the team present in “management.”
Agreed. I was involved in a project that lasted several years and the project manager was great at filtering out the bullshit and politics so it doesn’t go down to my level. They were also great as an interface between teams so I wouldn’t need to directly deal with people who are difficult to work with. I wish she was the project manager on the other projects I’m involved in right now.
I was a project manager for a pretty large project last year at my job. I really tried my best to shield the developers from all the bullshit. We had a very difficult customer who changed their mind almost twice a week about things, demanded meetings about the progress 2-3 times a week, didn’t understand that the requested changes won’t be in the testsystem within a day of mentioning them (not even sending us a proper change request in writing, just mentioning them in a meeting) and so on. Not to mention talking with the higher-ups who got nervous when the customer kept complaining and explaining to them that we/the devs are working as fast as possible and that the customer is being unreasonable.
The worst part about that role was not the utterly irrational customer but our own colleagues in development. They unloaded all their frustration about the project on me. I tried to handle it, in a way it’s part of the job. I got shit on by the customer for not meeting their unreasonable demands and ridiculous timelines, got shit on by upper management because this project with this very important customer is having trouble, had to defend myself AND the rest of the team by showing that the customer doesn’t know what they want. Just to then turn around and get screamed at by a dev because he’s sick of having to go to our 1/2-hour-a-week meeting and also how come there’s been four change requests already. He told me I wasn’t doing my job, because all he wants is to implement the requirements as planned half a year ago but I kept sending change requests instead of doing my job as a project manager and shielding him from this shit. Wouldn’t believe me that if the customer had his way, he’d be getting four change requests per week.
Yeah, I’m pissed and also currently looking for a new job. And no way am I ever doing this shit job again, where you’re just everybody’s doormat and get yelled at by customers, bosses and your own team alike.
Yeah. Life is short man. I wish you luck in the search, 100%.
An old friend of mine was in a similar situation (worse, I think, if you can believe) and also getting shit for pay. After a while, he went to his boss and explained that he needed things A, B, and C to change if he was going to stay in this role. His boss started yelling at him and belittling him, he stuck to his guns and basically just reiterated what he had said.
Obviously, nothing changed, and so he told his boss he was out. When the next day he didn’t show up, his boss called him at home and started yelling at him again. He said it was like all the cares of the world, all the heaviness and stress just fell away suddenly, during the conversation. As it happened his boss was in the middle of yelling, “We don’t need you, you son of a bitch” or something like that, and he was able to cut in to say something along the lines “Hey, man, if you don’t need me, don’t call me. I’m at home. I did my part. You called me. Anything else I can do for you?”
The smile on his face when he relayed this part of the story to me was a wonderful thing to behold.
there’s a vital role just in having an advocate for the team present in “management.”
As a bench level employee, every time I’m asked how long something will take I have to take time to assess where I’m at, what needs doing, and when people in other departments will be able to get to their portion of the project (answer: fuck if I know), which takes even more time away from the project. Then I have to go back and figure out where I was and what I was doing on the project that I was working on. I’m typically on three or so projects at a time in various stages of complete, with one or two waiting in the wings. When you have a different person every day asking you about a different project than the one you’re working on at that exact moment, it seriously slows things down.
Dear God… I tried to think of some more from my time in that world, and all I could come up with was “when the rubber meets the road.”
There must be more, but I have forgotten. Is it finally wearing off? I’m free now, after so many years? I can just be happy?
“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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fixed it.
