one mans rant about project managers

warrmr · Apr 27, 2008

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I stumbled accross the angry aussie and found this posting that i found pretty amusing

Over more than 10 years of contracting as an IT Business Analyst, Ive learned there are two main reasons companies hire contractors. Either theyre running some huge sprawling project and want to throw more bodies at it or they dont have the in house expertise for a particular project so they want to bring in an outsider who does.
Although the big, sprawling projects are a major source of employment, I really dont like working on them. The main reason for my dislike is that most of these massive projects are disasters. The company is trying to do too much with too little idea of how to do it. The classic nightmare for IT staff is to be stuck in a project thats date driven.
By date driven I mean that the only way the project is measured is by whether or not is it delivered by some totally arbitrary date. Its bad enough when you have to deal with a project manager who wants you to bow down before their Gantt chart as if its Holy Scripture. But I have actually worked on multi-million dollar projects where all activity is driven by the fact that someone in senior management has said it should be done by a certain date.
Theres nothing that fills a development team with horror quite so much as something along the lines of the new financial system wil be in place before the end of the financial year. And when you ask how that date was arrived at you get little more than that should be enough time. As an analyst I find that sort of crap particularly galling because people who think this is a good way to run a project usually get pissed off when I start actually doing my job.
They get pissed off because my job is to ask questions and arbitrarily set dates usually dont hold up well to questioning. Heres an approximation of fun conversations that happen on projects like this
Click to expand...

http://angryaussie.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/project-management-disasters/

hbroomhall · Apr 27, 2008

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Nice - and I love the reference to "The mythical man-month".

I think it's time I got it out again and re-read it.

Harry.

dmarsh · Apr 28, 2008

Welcome to my world ! Read Mythical Man Month and 100's of other books over the years, trouble is doesn't matter a jot, until upper management learns to read and think its pretty irrelevant...

I keep toying with the idea of if you can't beat em join em, maybe I could make a difference in management, but how could I live with myself if I got forced to be yet another pointy haired boss ?

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