Project Management is a big thing these days. Companies are placing a lot of emphasis on it, calling seemingly every little task a project, assigning project managers to them, and using bulky and expensive tools to track every little detail. You would think with all of this effort the project managers themselves would be highly sharpened tools of efficiency and precision. Unfortunately, while some are, many are not. Some of them are just tools.
One project manager I know has a particular style he likes to use. That is, delegate everything to someone else, including all the project management parts. For the life of me, I can't see what else he is good for. He doesn't even keep track of where "his project" is, in terms of progress. If you ask him where files are, he says that is an IT question. If you ask which programmers are working on the project, he says that is a developer problem, go ask the developers.
This project manager approached me once to say he had placed some client files on our network, and now he needed them shared to the development staff on one of his projects. As an IT task related to a project, he was supposed to make the request through our project management software. That isn't his style, though, and I've grown accustomed to writing up his requests as I go, so they are documented and time is tracked properly. But I digress. Without blinking, I simply asked him where he put the files, so I could set up the file sharing for him. For no apparent reason, this infuriated him. I was IT, I should know where all the files are. Apparently, in his mind, I am supposed to be clairvoyant as well as a content indexer for the many terabytes of data we have online.
A big part of project management includes setting goals, milestones, and deadlines for the projects they are working on. Going off schedules costs money and annoys clients. It's a project manager's job to make sure the project team all marches together to the same beat. But, that just doesn't happen with sometimes.
A new project task was assigned to IT one morning. A relatively simple task to perform, but involving contact with a third-party provider that was outside of our control. In the task description the project manager noted that the task would need to be completed before the project end date, which was weeks away. That was okay with me, because at that moment I was flooded with tasks for other projects, and short-handed with staffers out sick and wrapped up offsite with other clients. I shuffled it down the stack a bit, and tackled bigger fires.
Near the end of the same day, Mr. Project Manager came to pay me a visit. He demanded to know when I would complete the task he assigned me, and stated I was holding up his entire team. Out of context, and having been swamped with dozens of projects to work on that day, I wasn't sure which task he was talking about. This only annoyed him further, to the point he started throwing words like incompetent and lazy. I jumped on the task, made a call to the third-party provider, and pushed it through after business hours.
With the task complete, I needed to update my part of the documentation. As I was doing that, Mr. Senior Project Manager noticed I was working late, and stopped by for a chat. Curious about what I was working on, I told him I was working late to wrap up a task for that particular project. He frowned, and asked to use my computer for a moment, which I obliged.
A few seconds later, he informs me that they had already cancelled that project, at the request of the client. Their needs had changed, and they could not wait for the projected completion date. Apparently Mr. Project Manager was trying to push the project through anyway. To do so, he was throwing out whatever time frame had been laid down, and railroading everyone in its path to get the work done. He had been pushing development and billing that day, too. Maybe he was hoping for a bonus, but I don't think his plan worked out quite the way he expected it to. The client decision to cancel was final.
The extra work Mr Project Manager had everyone do was just wasteful and disruptive. It all could have been avoided, had the project manager been aware of the client needs. Work could have been completed sooner had he communicated a more urgent need or adjusted the schedule for the project. Once he knew the client wanted to cancel the project, he should have discussed it with them to find out if there were any other options they were open to. If they had been okay with a modified schedule, which might have included overtime costs, it could have worked out. Instead, we ended up wasting resources on a dead project, incurring third-party costs along the way.
Project Managers: It is your job to manage projects. Obviously. To do that, you need to manage the people, resources, expenses, and time associated with your projects. If you don't know who is doing what, when they are going to do it and when they need to be done doing it, or how much it is going to cost, then you aren't managing. Oh, and while you're at it, if you are going to abuse your team, you're eventually going to find out that you don't have one anymore. All of that, plus... you suck.
