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Many problems have come from people conflating "task management" with "project management". If you've got a team of people that need a lot of hand-holding, the

Many problems have come from people conflating "task management" with "project management". If you've got a team of people that need a lot of hand-holding, the two can be the same. In most cases though there is a lot of experience on the team. In that case task management too easily becomes micromanaging. What is needed instead is managing against milestones and trusting your team members to execute against it. Some team members can be trusted on certain tasks more than others, but the solution is closely monitoring those that need support, not forcing task tracking across the entire team.

tyingq 5y ago
Project managers can add a lot of value by zooming out and finding dependencies that would slow things down. The less obvious ones, especially chained ones.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 5y ago
  How often do they, in your experience? From my perspective, the only ones discovering and calling out dependencies are senior engineers (or higher) either during planning or during active development, as the PMs are blissfully unaware of how anything's actually connected, even if they've been handed architectural diagrams on a silver platter.
pfraze 5y ago
This resonates with me more than the other comments. I’ve done a lot of self-directed work, and I’ve worked at web dev shops. In the latter, the only complaint I ever had about Jira was that it was slow. My PMs were my favorite people; they were like my “operator” while I was heads down (in the matrix). They helped deal with the big picture and talk to the client while I pushed through tickets. Jira was perfect for that because they owned it and I just showed up to click the buttons they had configured. In all my self-directed work with small teams- you’re right, we just needed a task manager. The overhead of PM would have been a net negative. We basically just needed to track our own conversations with each other.

tyingq 5y ago

Project managers can add a lot of value by zooming out and finding dependencies that would slow things down. The less obvious ones, especially chained ones.

sdiupIGPWEfh 5y ago
How often do they, in your experience? From my perspective, the only ones discovering and calling out dependencies are senior engineers (or higher) either during planning or during active development, as the PMs are blissfully unaware of how anything's actually connected, even if they've been handed architectural diagrams on a silver platter.

pfraze 5y ago

This resonates with me more than the other comments. I’ve done a lot of self-directed work, and I’ve worked at web dev shops. In the latter, the only complaint I ever had about Jira was that it was slow. My PMs were my favorite people; they were like my “operator” while I was heads down (in the matrix). They helped deal with the big picture and talk to the client while I pushed through tickets. Jira was perfect for that because they owned it and I just showed up to click the buttons they had configured. In all my self-directed work with small teams- you’re right, we just needed a task manager. The overhead of PM would have been a net negative. We basically just needed to track our own conversations with each other.