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There are two things I've decided are true, regarding project management. #1 - "Those who manage best, manage least." Spend the minimal amount of time on proje

by ethbr0 5y ago

There are two things I've decided are true, regarding project management. #1 - "Those who manage best, manage least." Spend the minimal amount of time on project management. Even project managers should spend a minimal amount of their time "project managing," which leads directly to #2... #2 - "Project manager is a task, not a job." No one in the company should be a "project manager," and nothing else. The rationale is that if project management is a job, project management becomes the sole work output. And optimizing for that output leads to all the worst excesses I've seen at companies. And consequently, all the shit products (or shit design choices within good products) listed. If you have a perfectly tracked project that took 100s of person-hours to generate and update tracking docs, what does that do for your end users? People do their jobs. Make sure everyone's ultimate job is to bring value to the company. PS: And to head off the complaint that this ignores project scale, your company is not IBM. You don't have the management problems 1960s IBM had. So stop using solutions to "How do I orchestrate the progress of 100s of developers all working on the same project?!" Because the number of projects that large, that can't be broken into subprojects, is very few.

travisjungroth 5y ago
I've kicked around the idea that project manager should be a very low level job. Like first job out of college or maybe high school. The job would be: make sure the current state of the project is reflected in our software. No predicting the future (burndown, gantt), no changing the future (make sure it gets done on time) and no responsibility without authority trap. I think one person could support a very large project (or more smaller ones) this way. And why do it? So proper data is in the project management tool. Then people with the actual correct responsibility/authority/expertise can make good decisions based on good data. Also cuts down on interruptions. You go from quadratic communication (M stakeholders pinging N engineers) to linear (M stakeholders consuming 1 feed that's fed by N engineers). In theory, everyone just keeping their tickets up-to-date would get rid of that need. History has shown that doesn't work. Also a sufficiently smart tool would cover it, but it hasn't been made yet. Maybe a 20-year-old who sits in on meetings, gets a notification for every PR state change and nicely asks people how things are going would do a better job.

by ethbr0 5y ago

travisjungroth 5y ago

I've kicked around the idea that project manager should be a very low level job. Like first job out of college or maybe high school. The job would be: make sure the current state of the project is reflected in our software. No predicting the future (burndown, gantt), no changing the future (make sure it gets done on time) and no responsibility without authority trap. I think one person could support a very large project (or more smaller ones) this way. And why do it? So proper data is in the project management tool. Then people with the actual correct responsibility/authority/expertise can make good decisions based on good data. Also cuts down on interruptions. You go from quadratic communication (M stakeholders pinging N engineers) to linear (M stakeholders consuming 1 feed that's fed by N engineers). In theory, everyone just keeping their tickets up-to-date would get rid of that need. History has shown that doesn't work. Also a sufficiently smart tool would cover it, but it hasn't been made yet. Maybe a 20-year-old who sits in on meetings, gets a notification for every PR state change and nicely asks people how things are going would do a better job.