Project management is a huge subject isn't it? Yeah it is so I will just start off with some of the burning issues and gradually I would like to share all of my key learnings with nearly 20 years of my experience and more than 10 years of Management practice.
Let me begin with a interesting question.. What do successful project managers do and what they don't do?
Bad project managers ask for Status!!!
Hey what's your status.. When can you deliver this? Can we have some estimates? We need to commit to some timelines!!!
Yes ofcourse we still have the category of people who would instantly jump at counter dialogues What!! You wanna work without any deadlines.. The point is not about requirements and deadlines..The Point is about the whole story..
It starts with Requirements, then follows in depth and thorough analysis, researching through a larger experienced and informed group about is this something to be developed afresh or can we leverage products or reuse existing assets, then comes The high level Design ideas, brainstorming for all possible good and bad options and the Tradeoffs with each design option, or even selection of multiple design options to cater to various requirements, this should be followed by documentation of Architecture, Design options and Data models. A lot of healthy debating, noting down and recording discussions on why some of the design options were considered and why some were rejected and on what basis some were chosen. At this stage people are scared of taking firm decisions based on concrete Logic, documented knowledgebase and often start to create the mess at this stage itself.
Brings me to the point of SEI CMM level processes. The processes exactly point out defects were injected and what stage and realized at which stage. However these processes turn out to be massive overheads and a total waste of time if people at a companywide or at a department level or at a project level stage get into the habit of making glorious mistakes and suppressing the right members and their ideas and resort to nepotism or come under Client pressure to commit to dates without doing these steps holistically.
Dates and Status cannot begin to happen as the first stage just after the requirements have been discussed - as this is the first mistake Client facing and PMO and Product teams resort to!!!
We have seen a barrage of failures over the last 20 years in the history of the IT world and have caused major debacles and investment failures with wrong practices, working styles, wrong resourcing and wrong culture values being flown down the chain due to non hands on leaders and leaders who were promoted without going through the rigor themselves!!!
Most of the Tier1 IT companies today are facing losses and are at a junction where they are unable to grow anymore or have earned a glorious name for themselves being bad employers..not to mention the deep corrupt practices that power seekers have indulged in and have dragged so many people into the deep muck leading to all the wrong things of life.
So coming back to the simple basics:
Requirements should be followed by in depth analysis and with buy in and suggestions from as many relevant stakeholder groups being actively involved.
This should be followed by Engineering teams documenting and presenting the various design options and the tradeoffs and also the multiple system options to cater to all scalability, user experience and various use cases.
These should be followed by the Proof Of Concept phase for requirements that are a first of it's kind for the team or complex activities.
Once the above are holistically done and the teams are sure of making informed decisions for all aspects, only then Estimations and timelines can come in.
Now lets see what mistakes Project Managers would resort to once timelines have been published.
Imagine a scene where a Project Manager uses sentences like - Hey what's the status VS Hey how's it going.
Typically answers to the first question would be very typical wrong answers like yes, good, ok, will be done, etc.
The answers to the second question would be a narrative of what the team member is doing to create the solution, through which the Project lead would be able to understand if the member is developing the requirement in the right manner or is he going wrong or is he stuck and needs help from a senior or the Lead himself.
Moreover, Product mangers, Sales teams and non hands on Project Managers by pressurizing members to hurry up, pester them by asking for repeated status, force them to follow some inefficient ways to do things, or even not allowing developers the freedom to try out various options and making a informed decision!!!
Great developers are lost to attrition simply because of such rash behavior by either the Top management or lower level leads or other stakeholders who fail to appreciate the rigor and specialized techniques that members put in to create good business solutions.
Another great crime Product teams commit is to glorify how brilliant their roles are and how insignificant the developers are and how confused and how bad their communication skills are etc.
The very fact that most of these characters took the escape path from the complicated subjects and chose something apparently simpler leads to such mannerisms.
The truth is any job has it's justice to be done to the subject and people who are supposed to work on it. It's the escapists characters on all sides who create all the ruckus and pollute the environment.
Another way to judge and assess Team members on all sides is to assign a End to End and In Depth development of Subject Matter Expertise on the work that is assigned.
Having a few lightweights and heavy lifters can always cause issues within a team.
Glorious Tier1 companies made such mistakes by creating roles like Solution Architects and Presales and Product Teams who would just initiate a project and do all the light weight stuff and as soon as it reaches the in depth activities the tasks are thrown off to the backend and development teams and the deliveries are presented by the front facing guys.
Now this situation is tricky but is only complicated by people with wrong intentions.
Ideally a Project Manager should be involved and the Key driving agent from the start to the finish of the program including Demos where the sales team provides the required support to get the gob done with full earnest.
Isolating Sales, Presales(Technical members supporting Sales but who lose hands on knowledge in the long run), Architecture and Design team, US, testing and lastly the most battered development team who has to bear the brunt of non practical deadlines and flak from Sales and Test teams for doing a bad job is a sureshot arrangement for failures, attrition, bad work culture and mess!!!
While isolating might be required due to either specializations or non fitment issues the respect for each team and mention of the entire team without glorifying individuals should be of utmost importance and a culture value.
Hope the points I wanted to make are clear by now but ofcourse these mean nothing as I have experienced off late with a few junior but empowered members. Point is without the experience how can you expect people to behave the ideal way..it just does not happen!!
I would like to continue elaborating the above with real life stories but would update this post going forward with such experiences...
Would like to sign off for now with a few takeaways:
Respect for Knowledge, Respect for effort, Respect for opinions, Respect for individuals, Self development of in depth expertise on subjects leading to a mature outlook that helps develop all of the above traits are some of the qualities that help establish a healthy work environment!!!
On the very crucial topic of Resource Management.. the traditional way of providing a develoment feedback ..most managers tend to drive down the way of making negative comments like you faulted here and that was not good and client did not like this..almost as if snowballing into a fault finding spree.
The above approach in my opinion is not only dangerous and bad but it at times becomes life altering!!!
People remember only the negative things throughout their lives and careers and their personalities get impacted negatively.
I for sure had this personal trait of reacting to every negatively articulated feedback that has been ever provided to me by every human being. However let me take a position that I was absolutely correct in thinking about it in that manner because the root problem was not my fault.
The root problem here is the asessor or the judge or the supervisor or manager or client who is providing the feedback cannot take things for granted and go on a blaming spree..
What is required is to have a mental binding and a concience that a business or a company is not paying you hard earned money to play your personal politics or your games or play out and excercise your whims n fancies or your tantrums or your personal agenda or your weaknesses be it as a dictator or as a slimy personality who first behaves recklessly and then makes up excuses or says sorry for his impulsive conduct.
A business pays you money to do a very professional job with utmost thoughfulness and by applying latest knowledge tools and techniques and with the use of one's experience and insights and through collaboration and ofcourse make the whole thing personal in a positive sense where you use your instincts to make good judgements ..phew ..lots of wisodm aint't it ..well yeah 🤗
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