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Yes they’re treating things like being the PM makes them the de facto boss over operations and process for that slice of our work. This is made worse by repeatedly demonstrating poor understanding of the subject matter, dogging holes filled only with technical debt, and behind-the-scenes work that the team is not kept apprised of. I understand you can’t be an evangelical project manager thumping on some PMI bible. Company and team requirements , dynamics , and culture drive how things will work in reality. However, you can’t at the same time as using the role as a license to dictate things use it as a pass to exempt yourself. But, if work is getting done even if lovely, and management won’t back that this is a problem, then it only festers and continues.
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Jul 31, 2018 23:03
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Partycat posted:Just about every project manager that put PMP in their title or email signature was bad. They seem to treat it as a license to just do whatever they want.
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Aug 2, 2018 02:56
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Really depends on the org. Where I work Project Manager exists as their own role. Some rise up from being technical contributors but others, like me, rose up as project controls specialists then got more responsibility as a project manager. I have some technical depth in the areas that I manage but only enough to call bullshit and translate to upper management.
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Aug 2, 2018 03:23
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Dik Hz posted:Eh. Given that it takes 2 years of PM experience to even qualify for the certificate, I think it shows a certain dedication to get it. It takes 2 years of project experience not PM experience. Most of my hours were from various roles I had as part of a project, not direct PM roles. Edit: I just checked the PMI website and either I am crazy or they changed it to say directing/leading projects. When I got my PMP in 2013 my boss told me I just needed project experience and not direct experience. PMI accepted my hours. Maybe they just didn't catch it because I wasn't selected for an audit or maybe they have changed the requirements since then to be more specific. D-Pad fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Aug 2, 2018 |
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Aug 2, 2018 22:04
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D-Pad posted:It takes 2 years of project experience not PM experience. Most of my hours were from various roles I had as part of a project, not direct PM roles. They’re very loose in their definition of “project management” still to this day
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Aug 2, 2018 22:17
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D-Pad posted:It takes 2 years of project experience not PM experience. Most of my hours were from various roles I had as part of a project, not direct PM roles.
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Aug 2, 2018 23:44
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Higgy posted:Not sure on those integrations but my teams do use confluence to track requirements. The nutshell of it is that we generate software feature pages that have a table of requirements broken down into enough detail and acceptance test language that our devs can work and test them. This is what I was looking for, thanks! Ill give confluence a try
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Aug 5, 2018 00:33
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oh hey a PM thread, helloDik Hz posted:I kinda feel that project management is an add-on skill and not a role by itself, but that's just me. I mean, I'm not a PM, but when I've done PM-type poo poo, I've always had some skin in the game as the technical resource. Likewise, my peers in supply chain have skin in the game when they do PM style projects. Same with our engineering team and plant managers. I imagine it must be tougher to get buy-in from the stakeholders if you're not one too. I think with a large enough project there is enough for a PM to do that it is a full job itself, but having been both of these (a PM with some technical resource/skill and a PM without it), I definitely prefer managing projects where I have some understanding of the subject area. I've been working in the same area for 3 years now so I did some additional education to be somewhat useful as a resource to my technical team and my relationship with them is much stronger for it. I remember hating managing construction projects because I didn't know anything about construction and didn't care to learn, it was miserable all around.
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Sep 7, 2018 20:28
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My dream is to become a project manager. Should I just kill myself now or wait till I get really into it? Any advice?
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Dec 20, 2018 17:31
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ApolloSuna posted:My dream is to become a project manager. Should I just kill myself now or wait till I get really into it? Any advice? Also, read every relevant resource/class/lecture/webinar on influencing without authority. Cuz that's your job now.
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Dec 21, 2018 01:18
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Oh man totally forgot about this thread. We are going through demos for choosing a new ERP software and it is gruuuuuuuuuuuuuuueling. Thankfully we had it whittled down to 2 bids but still.
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Dec 21, 2018 01:22
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Jedi Knight Luigi posted:Oh man totally forgot about this thread. Have fun with it being a disaster no matter which bid you settle on. ApolloSuna posted:My dream is to become a project manager. Should I just kill myself now or wait till I get really into it? Any advice? what the other poster said with heavy emphasis on "influencing without authority". The technical aspects of managing scope, schedule, and budget is the easy poo poo. It's the soft skill leadership poo poo that will make you want to take a header into an oven. Enjoy!
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Dec 28, 2018 23:15
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Is there a ERP thread? We use Epicor 10.1 but the larger company that we merged with uses Microsoft AX and they're talking about making us switch and I am not looking forward to it. Epicor is poo poo in a lot of ways but after 10 years its poo poo is a known quantity for me at least
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Jan 26, 2019 19:25
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The Berzerker posted:oh hey a PM thread, hello Being technically savvy doesn't make you a good PM. It also doesn't make you a bad PM. I've seen it go both ways as well as vice-versa that being technically clueless doesn't stop people from being good managers of technical programs. Generally though, being able to talk intelligently about the technical challenges is a useful skill, it generally ads credibility to your schedule and cost estimates.
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Apr 5, 2019 19:00
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Murgos posted:It really depends on the person. If you arent a technical PM though I think you need especially good technical leads who could be decent PMs themselves but dont want to.
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Apr 5, 2019 19:34
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CarForumPoster posted:If you arent a technical PM though I think you need especially good technical leads who could be decent PMs themselves but dont want to.
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Apr 5, 2019 21:30
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I am 'Gesamtprojekleiter' which is basically a Project Director or Large Project Manager for a utility company. I think I am the only Project Director in the company of the 5 of us from a management background and not as part of a purely technical progression, but it is in essence its own role. We also have Project Managers or Package Managers as a component if dealing with the specific sections of the project amd they are more technical leads than they are a dedicated Management trained resource. I have been a Project Manager in several incarnations in the past, from being involved only for the execution and needing to explain to the phase 1 estimator why his idea was never feasible, to being involved only in the very beginning when I created an execution plan that was disliked by the management because it didnt meet their intended margin and looked like it would tank (which it mostly did). Am I a powerhouse of perfection that never makes mistakes? Absolutely not, the sum of my current ability is as a result of seeing a collection of things over time, both mine and my own, that have not worked, been overlooked, or forgot some key element in a joint venture relationship. I tend to be a supporter of the PMI methodologies and while we adopt them loosely each of our major projects are able to define their own Project Management Office processes to suit the characteristics of the needs. (Major project in our sense is anything over 500m€.) My career beginnings were in the military as an officer, supplemented with other management and leadership training, within the Engineering units. I then left into Civil Engineering projects as a Project Manager of small projects and evolved eventually into the Power industry, then Offshore Power projects. The biggest task in my role is by far extracting information, statements and updates from the packages and other technical departments to allow us to have all the information to make what are hopefully well informed decisions. We get to spend a lot of time playing with wonderful tools like P6, Risk Management Analyser, Power BI and oh so many powerpoint presentations..
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May 27, 2019 12:46
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Dik Hz posted:I think you need to either know enough to know where your blindspots are. Or you need to know so little technically that you route everything through your SMEs. It's that gap in the middle that's really dangerous. Sorry for the double post but just to come back to this. My experience has taught me one prevailing point regarding technical staff and Project Management:- 'All good Project Managers would make good Engineers, but not all good Engineers will make good Project Managers'. I made this statement for the first time about 20 years ago and to date I haven't felt the need to change it. I have met some fantastic Engineers who are simply great Engineers and who want nothing else, but I have also seen plenty of Engineers pushed into Project Management roles as the only route to promotion or pay rise and they haven't been given sufficient instruction, information or exposure (and often use it as an extended authority to the technical department). On the flip side a good Project Manager can intuitively roll back processes needed to reach a response and often make good Engineering candidates and pick up the necessary basics they need for their project quite quickly. I agree that the strength of the Project is the sum of its parts, and great SME's are essential in reaching an optimal performance. Great PMO resources are also an often under-represented element in project success.
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May 27, 2019 12:52
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Emnity posted:I have met some fantastic Engineers who are simply great Engineers and who want nothing else, but I have also seen plenty of Engineers pushed into Project Management roles as the only route to promotion or pay rise and they haven't been given sufficient instruction, information or exposure (and often use it as an extended authority to the technical department). Kidding aside, if a sponsor has the time and understanding to provide those 3 things, they can just assign a matrix employee to it.
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May 30, 2019 01:56
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Dik Hz posted:If you're given sufficient instruction, information, and exposure, are you even a project manager any more? I've seen people in the defense industry who are engineers that want to get promoted via the PM route take some PM classes, go through earned value training, or get a systems engineering, engineering management masters or MBA ahead of actually getting much responsibility.
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Jun 1, 2019 18:23
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So much like the guy above, I've got experience in IT, just finished by degree in business which included a class on project management, completed the CAPM, and have no clue where to go from here for a career that includes "project" in the title. So... where do I go from here? I've got some influencing people type books on the way, but looking for some good directional advice beyond that.
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Jun 3, 2019 04:36
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ilkhan posted:So much like the guy above, I've got experience in IT, just finished by degree in business which included a class on project management, completed the CAPM, and have no clue where to go from here for a career that includes "project" in the title. So... where do I go from here? I've got some influencing people type books on the way, but looking for some good directional advice beyond that. Sign up for a job no one else wants. In defense contracting that job is "Cost Account Manager". This is a position usually held by a technical lead that is a precursor to becoming a PM. No one, even PMs, wants to be a CAM. It loving sucks. I was one for a year before I pawned it off on a sucker who wanted to get promoted. I myself used it to get promoted from an Engineer 2 to 3. It sucks, but now I can actually plan a project and know what it feels like when things are going wrong (CPI/SPI <0.95-1.15<) or going right. I can say I actually answered budgeting questions for a customer, and participated in baseline/budget reviews. These are boring but necessary things for engineers who want to plan\carry out projects in that industry. CarForumPoster fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Jun 3, 2019 |
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Jun 3, 2019 04:55
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Oh boy, so glad to see this thread. I lead a PMO in a company you've definitely heard of. I'm poo poo at managing projects because I have no attention span or attention to detail and hate working with people. However, I've made a career of building a framework where anal retentive, OCD Type-A project managers can actually contribute to an organization's success. A few fundamental truths I've learned: 90% of your job is fighting against human nature. People instinctively do things that are counterproductive, and even when they understand that, they still do them. If you work in a technical field, you will get very little respect or appreciation from the people who need you most. If they were good at managing work within their own function or communicating with people in other areas, your job wouldn't exist. When you hear people bitch about you, just know that their shortcomings keep you employed. Want to be loved? Go be a nurse or a teacher. Most enterprise project management software is utter poo poo, good only for creating job security for a bloated PMO. The lightweight boutique packages that cater to a particular methodology are way better. 80% of project managers are trash at their job, hiding in those bloated PMOs where they can't be easily evaluated based on their own performance. The dirty secret of this job is that it's hard for management to tell when someone does it badly because it's so easy to blame things beyond your control. Every duration estimate you've ever heard is hugely padded, and people's only incentive is to keep you from finding that out. If you lock them in a room and make an intern watch them work, that two-week task will be done before lunch. Everyone knows that multitasking is hugely counterproductive, but our organizations are typically set up to encourage it. If you've got someone pivotal on your project being pulled in six directions, you can be their personal savior by giving them clear task priorities and letting them focus on banging one out at a time. The PMP certification doesn't say much for your ability, but you should probably go ahead and do it (then let it expire) if this is a field you want to make a career of and you're actively seeking lower level PM jobs. Once you have proven experience, no one will care anymore. If you really learn MS Project, Excel, and VBA , you can drastically simplify your job by automating everything tedious. I'm not familiar with the "collaboration" bells and whistles in MSP2013 and beyond, but I'm an absolute ace at writing VBA macros for MS Project (and Excel) or just general configuration stuff - happy to answer questions about that in this thread or by PM, because I'm an absolute nerd and I love it.
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Jun 4, 2019 02:29
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High Lord Elbow posted:Every duration estimate you've ever heard is hugely padded, and people's only incentive is to keep you from finding that out. If you lock them in a room and make an intern watch them work, that two-week task will be done before lunch. https://i.imgur.com/PIezOg5.mp4
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Jun 4, 2019 02:55
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High Lord Elbow posted:Oh boy, so glad to see this thread. I lead a PMO in a company you've definitely heard of. I'm poo poo at managing projects because I have no attention span or attention to detail and hate working with people. However, I've made a career of building a framework where anal retentive, OCD Type-A project managers can actually contribute to an organization's success. Everything here is insanely spot on in almost every facet from my experience.
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Jun 7, 2019 06:19
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High Lord Elbow posted:Oh boy, so glad to see this thread. I lead a PMO in a company you've definitely heard of. I'm poo poo at managing projects because I have no attention span or attention to detail and hate working with people. However, I've made a career of building a framework where anal retentive, OCD Type-A project managers can actually contribute to an organization's success. Haha this is tremendously spot on in every way! Bravo sir!
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Jun 7, 2019 08:02
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High Lord Elbow posted:If you work in a technical field, you will get very little respect or appreciation from the people who need you most. If they were good at managing work within their own function or communicating with people in other areas, your job wouldn't exist. When you hear people bitch about you, just know that their shortcomings keep you employed. Want to be loved? Go be a nurse or a teacher. I love this in particular. I still PM but I also teach it now and this is something my students really need to understand - you are going to be viewed as a villain by a lot of your coworkers, but your function is necessary because of the areas in which they are lacking, so be prepared.
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Jun 8, 2019 22:13
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The Berzerker posted:I love this in particular. I still PM but I also teach it now and this is something my students really need to understand - you are going to be viewed as a villain by a lot of your coworkers, but your function is necessary because of the areas in which they are lacking, so be prepared.
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Jun 11, 2019 02:05
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High Lord Elbow posted:you will get very little respect or appreciation from the people who need you most I think I found your problem
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Jun 17, 2019 23:28
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I'm a tech lead being tasked with more and more project management work. As someone coming from a development background, what should I keep in mind to be successful?
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Jun 25, 2019 03:41
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Stormtrooper posted:I'm a tech lead being tasked with more and more project management work. As someone coming from a development background, what should I keep in mind to be successful? Protect your tech’s time from your sponsor/client/customer/whateverr, understand what they care about, and make it your mission to remove the poo poo that stops them from doing their job or generally just annoys them. That’ll put you in the top few percent of PMs. The rest is busywork imo
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Jun 25, 2019 04:07
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Higgy posted:Protect your tech’s time from your sponsor/client/customer/whateverr, understand what they care about, and make it your mission to remove the poo poo that stops them from doing their job or generally just annoys them. That’ll put you in the top few percent of PMs. I'll do that! I also took on the job full time recently and found one project was just bullshit clearing. I was a bloody snowplow ahead of my team in that regard... Kind of liked it.
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Jun 25, 2019 04:19
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Stormtrooper posted:I'm a tech lead being tasked with more and more project management work. As someone coming from a development background, what should I keep in mind to be successful? Also, technical skills aren't PM skills. Be humble and don't assume that because you're awesome at your job, you'll be decent at PM. It's like pro athletes going into broadcasting. The best athletes are rarely the best broadcasters. The best broadcasters are the ones who put as much work into broadcasting as they did into sports.
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Jun 25, 2019 21:52
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Glad there's a thread for this. I recently discovered that Project Management was a field and I'm interested to see the tips and resources people share here. A bit of personal background: I went to college for Computer Science, hit a wall with the higher level calculus classes and changed majors to English, Creative Writing. Graduated, did some jobs as a reporter, gas station attendent, strip club emcee, and data processor before moving to a bigger city. I really had no idea what I wanted to do, was unemployed, and was really undervaluing my skills (I was the EIC for my college's literary journal and the Features Editor for the college paper, but I didn't think that was management experience or worth focusing on). I applied to a temp agency, called them when I knew there'd be an opening in a government call center, and from there I was hired on as a government employee, promoted to clerk of the call center, then to case worker, then to network technician, and now to Management Analyst II in our PMO. I spent a year working in the same IT shop as our PMO without having any idea what the team did, and once I did I made a beeline to getting off the helpdesk phones and into PM work. So far it's been great. I've been sent to a few PM seminars and read just enough of the PMBOK Guide to answer my interview questions, but most of the concepts seem really common sense. I understand that I probably wouldn't come up with the PMBOK if I was in a vacuum, but it's not like scope creep is an arcane concept. I'm heading up a project to build a specialized webpage for our C-suite and I'm second on a larger undertaking to upgrade our agency from Office 2010 and Windows 7 to 2016/365 and Windows X. This involves buying a bunch of computers, working with larger government agencies, and communicating everything to our staff. My problem, if I have any, is that our interim Deputy Director of IT is a moron. He was promoted from Helpdesk supervisor mainly because he has the most experience and charisma, but he will often make up answers to questions, say the wrong thing when describing an object, and can't articulate a big picture view of what his department should be doing. Is it common for your boss's boss to actively be a problem to your projects? I'm having a meeting with him and the rest of the IT leaders ina week or so to go over all the upgrades and dependencies so we can all be on the same page and working on the right things at the right time, but I know he's going to say a few nothing answers then hurriedly get up to "deal with an emergency", which means the other leaders will make a plan only for the director to bring up some unknown information a few days later that puts things back into flux. It's really disappointing because the former Deputy Director was a real legend and I'm still finding OneNote pages written by him years ago that are like nuggets of gold in that they are a wealth of information and resources. He left right before I was promoted, and if the interim DD gets the position officially it's pretty clear that he's going to make an example out of a PM who has been vocally critical of him in the past. Sorry, that's kind of a vent but this is the first time I've felt like Dilbert dealing with his boss, and I just want to know if I've been lucky leading up to this or what.
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Aug 1, 2019 17:01
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It's so normal. So insanely normal. Though this seems like a soft skills question more than a pm one since it could happen to anyone does it not?
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Aug 2, 2019 03:49
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Veskit posted:It's so normal.
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Aug 2, 2019 05:50
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Dik Hz posted:Yup. If people were good at their jobs, you wouldn't need project managers. Correction: If people who are good at their jobs were good at aligning with people in other jobs and people weren’t inherently lazy without transparency and accountability, you wouldn’t need project managers. But people are people, so overhead increases.
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Aug 2, 2019 17:22
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High Lord Elbow posted:Correction: If people who are good at their jobs were good at aligning with people in other jobs and people weren’t inherently lazy without transparency and accountability, you wouldn’t need project managers. Yeah PMs are supposed to be people persons for people who aren't people persons. After graduating into the working world it was just baffling to me how so many of my colleagues on the main production floor, like, just couldn't talk to people either out of anxiety or a lack of social finesse that a client should never see anyway, even if they were extremely talented at the operational task they were doing each day. I fully recognize that later being hired as a PM at my company had more to do with the way I looked and acted every day and less to do with any sort of production/operational metrics I'd been taking care of before my promotion.
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Aug 2, 2019 18:09
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High Lord Elbow posted:Correction: If people who are good at their jobs were good at aligning with people in other jobs and people weren’t inherently lazy without transparency and accountability, you wouldn’t need project managers. A lot of words to say “if people could communicate effectively” The technical/wonky PM work of scheduling, calculating, and budgeting are 5% of the job. Good (such a big stress on “good”) PMs act as conduits for communication and not much else.
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Aug 3, 2019 02:31
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LawfulWaffle posted:Is it common for your boss's boss to actively be a problem to your projects? Double posting just to say that you’re in the right thread, friend.
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Aug 3, 2019 02:33
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