The Project Management Thread: it cost more than I thought it would.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > The Project Management Thread: it cost more than I thought it would.

Emnity: Sep 24, 2009; King of Scotland

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..

# ¿ May 27, 2019 12:46

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 11:30

Emnity: Sep 24, 2009; King of Scotland

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.

# ¿ May 27, 2019 12:52

Emnity: Sep 24, 2009; King of Scotland

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.

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.

Haha this is tremendously spot on in every way! Bravo sir!

# ¿ Jun 7, 2019 08:02

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > The Project Management Thread: it cost more than I thought it would.