I work in the public sector, which is a large enterprise beast that has it’s reason for being outside of tech, but a reason that increasingly can’t be executed

I work in the public sector, which is a large enterprise beast that has it’s reason for being outside of tech, but a reason that increasingly can’t be executed without tech. So this has obviously coloured my perspective in a way that may be strange to people in all tech teams in all tech businesses. We operate more than 500 applications from contractors, we’ve build around 200 ourselves and we utilise around 25 co-municipality open source solutions where we project lead but buy code from small local shops. We also track and benchmark everything. I think the biggest issue with project management, and, the agile toolkit is one that this article and a lot like it pass over a little too quickly. I don’t think there is a right answer, because every situation is different. We have a lot of smaller projects where less than five people build a piece of software that will either be left mostly alone for 25 years, or get completely replaced after five. On those cases utilising the whole agile toolkit is silly, because the only benefit it has is controlling how we learn together, and you can do that with simple light code-reviews. If complexity is really low, building extensive testing may even be a waste of time, and you genuinely rarely need a project manager for just 3 smart co-workers. On other projects we’re building extremely complex applications for thousands of end-users. That will have a direct impact on citizen lives. In these cases the “NASA engineering approach” is the way to go, and here project managers play a critical role connecting engineering and business. A lot of programmers can do what project managers do, but the interpersonal relationships, the historical knowledge of how to play corporate politics to get things done, and the time to do it, is not something you or your programmers really want. We really want that assembly line process, but there is just no perfect fit for everything in the world we operate.