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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."
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.
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."
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.
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.
Dependencies! Deliverables! Blockers!
Put me in coach, I'm ready!
Circle back, take this offline, T-shirt size
"Have you looked at the gantt chart? Are you on schedule?"
"The fuck is a gantt chart? I handle piss all day long"
Yeah, as a General Foreman in construction I would be up to my eyeballs in nonsense without my PM.
I understand the sentiment, but I had the pleasure of working with a great PM on a high profile project in my company and it was really good. The more moving parts and stakeholders there are, the more you're going to need someone to manage the stream of information, set expectations, keep the focus on the end goal. It was very good and I learned a lot from them.
That is what a Principle investigator does. Some who’d been a PI for 30 years does not need a project manager.
Good managers are able to allocate resources--particularly human resources--to complete a task. I know that it's a common trope to think that managers only take value instead of adding it, but it's simply not true; processes and production are less efficient without effective management.
People working in production shouldn't have to deal with clients/customers, nor should they be expected to coordinate with vendors, or even all other people involved in production. Production people are hired for their skill/expertise in production, so they should be left to do their job rather than taking on more jobs.
The flip side is that ineffective management can make processes and production less efficient than they would be without any management at all.
This may come as a surprise to some, but project managers exist outside of software as well.
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
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.
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.
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.
ITT: People who don't know the difference between product, program, and project managers.
A Project Manager is someone who thinks nine women can deliver a baby in one month.
The PM's job is to stop those doing the project from getting derailed. Literally manage the project. This means holding the stakeholder's feet to the fire. If the steak holder agrees to the terms they need to accept the repercussions of changing requirements, and their own misunderstanding.
Bad PMs don't hold the line. They don't signal early when bad things may be coming soon. They let all the shit derail productivity.
This is why systems like Agile were created. By making derailment a ceremony it became acceptable to remove the onus of the stakeholder to really make sure the project is ready and worth it.
edit: i should read over my dictated comments a little better
"Steak holders" lol, autoincorrect got you, but at least it's funny.
And I agree - good PM's are incredible. Bad PM's are useless.
The worst PMs are people-pleasers who don't set realistic expectations and promise things to clients that can't be delivered reasonable.
But those are also often the people who get promoted because those making the decisions like a "Yes" man who tries to make people happy with great "customer service."
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.
I think a super important thing people forget is a good PMs ability to always know where the data is that's been received. Can't tell you the number of times there's been conversations "we're waiting on x from the client" and the PM being long it's right here in the standard location. How they remember everything I don't know.
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:
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.
A lot of places park people who can't cut it doing the actual work in the project in project management roles instead of moving them on. They think, ohh they have intimate knowledge of the project and the working parts they'll be great.
It happens a lot for regular management as well.
A properly trained, proficient project manager can get more done with less people, defuse situations before they happen and cool the jets of higher ups making unreasonable demands.
Of course, some places are just shitholes run by assholes to which none of this applies.
I worked as an academic and supported and got funding for my programs for decades. I was a higher level GS employee for the feds and I ran new product development for a couple small to medium biotech firms. The last firm I worked for got bought by a giant multinational company which rhymes with Spargill. They changed the way we did things and suddenly, I had a "Project manager", who didn't know anything about the project I developed and managed. Nor did they do anything else I could figure out other than call me on the phone and ask what I was up to and how the projects, which I developed and was PI on were going. I swear to god I have no idea what these people did, but EVERYONE who was a scientist got at least one of these useless managers. And I can bet those "managers" got paid more than we did. Anyway, the only thing I could figure out was that project managers were positions given to people who couldn't do any real science anymore but had played the game and needed a reward. So their reward was to call up people like me every once in a while and ask me how things were going. Were there EVER a more useless job I can't imagine what it might be.
As a software guy, I love this. People building and running software products don't need project managers. We ned product owners/managers. It's a product, it has users, it doesn't have an end date.
Fuckin' preach. I've worked with a single pm worth their salt, and they got driven out by the useless cunts that couldn't MANAGE to get from their desk to a toilet without a meeting.
In my career most of the actually competent PMs actually got poached so we're left with the scraps.
Management is needed, you let ppl do whtever they want and nothing gets done in any reasonable amount of time
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.
On the other hand having a manager willing to yell at/stonewall the MBAs when they ~~deliberately lie about~~ misinterpret your recommendations and timelines is a godsend.
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.
My only gripe is when they act like they are technical instead of administrative.
Spoken like a vibe coder
