Project mommies!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because the PMs have zero idea what goes into each task they are asking me to complete and yell at me when I politely push back and offer up a reasonable TAT. Your timeline is not my issue, I am happy to be a team player, but some of their asks are just ridiculous.

Sounds like you just suck at your job, tbh.

OP, the above post answers your question.

Anonymous wrote:Because the PMs have zero idea what goes into each task they are asking me to complete and yell at me when I politely push back and offer up a reasonable TAT. Your timeline is not my issue, I am happy to be a team player, but some of their asks are just ridiculous.

Sounds like you just suck at your job, tbh.

Anonymous wrote:You job is to create a schedule, request resources (people and money) and protect the scope.

If you are assigned resources that are also responsible for operations, operations will take precedent. You need to ask for dedicated staff.

You cannot be told an end date; you must ask your staff what work needs to be done and schedule it. When there is a delay, you tell upper management and they either accept the schedule shift or give you more resources.

You can not allow people to add or change the scope, otherwise the project will go on forever and people get frustrated.

Remember good, fast, cheap.... pick 2 you can't have all 3.

Good and fast is expensive.
Fast and Cheap will be not a great product.
Good and Cheap will take a long time.  

Give you more resources?! Sure.
I'll give you nine women (resources).
Go make me a baby in 1 month.

PM seems like the most nightmare job. Like herding cats. And a very thankless job. I couldn’t do it, too stressful. The PMs at my job are stressed out and overworked.

Anonymous wrote:I was a PM for 15 years and I can attest that I was pretty useless. I managed it projects I had no idea what was going on. I did this for 3 companies and one government agency and it’s all the same. I hated it so much. I hated meetings just as much as the next person but we were forced by higher ups to have those status meetings.

Ugh, so much imposter syndrome. I felt so useless at work. Glad I am not a pm anymore.

PP. But I bet you made gorgeous dashboards.

Anonymous wrote:Because I have never encountered a project manager who had any clue about what was involved in actually completing the project that he was supposedly managing.

Also, because they mostly scheduled status meetings, which a) I hate, because I hate meetings and b) become an impediment to actually making progress in completing the project in question.

And I apologies if OP is actually good at the job, but I have been scarred by past experience with worse-than-useless project managers.

I can certainly see a place in an organization for good project managers, but they need to have some experience with the types of projects that they manage, rather than spending entire careers as project managers.

+1000. Project managers are taskmasters incapable of doing the actual work themselves.

Anonymous wrote:I’m now in the field and I notice so much push back. Why are people not accepting of the efforts the project manager and the project management team put into helping meet deadlines and lessen the issues for not delivering on time.

In my experience as a software architect, most PMs I’ve worked with don’t understand enough about the projects that they are “managing” to be in any way effective. It would be like me —- a person who couldn’t tell you how many players are on the field at a time in a football game — being tasked with being head coach, offensive coordinator, and defensive coordinator of an NFL team. I’d be utterly useless at best and at worst a significant obstacle to getting anything done.

Also, project managers and many other non-technical people suffer from the misapprehension that somehow skills must be distributed evenly. They believe that since they don’t understand technology, there’s some kind of cosmic rule that says there must be stuff they understand that technical people don’t. They believe that there is some magical pixie dust only available to people with PMPs that allows them to plan and allocate work. In fact, non-technical people don’t understand the work, don’t understand dependencies, don’t accept the reality that requirements change, and as a result spend most of their time creating “schedules” that are valid until the next time they meet with developers.

I was a PM for 15 years and I can attest that I was pretty useless. I managed it projects I had no idea what was going on. I did this for 3 companies and one government agency and it’s all the same. I hated it so much. I hated meetings just as much as the next person but we were forced by higher ups to have those status meetings.

Ugh, so much imposter syndrome. I felt so useless at work. Glad I am not a pm anymore.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because the PMs have zero idea what goes into each task they are asking me to complete and yell at me when I politely push back and offer up a reasonable TAT. Your timeline is not my issue, I am happy to be a team player, but some of their asks are just ridiculous.

You create the timeline for your tasks. You tell the PM and they put that in their plan.

Please tell that to my PM!

Anonymous wrote:Because the PMs have zero idea what goes into each task they are asking me to complete and yell at me when I politely push back and offer up a reasonable TAT. Your timeline is not my issue, I am happy to be a team player, but some of their asks are just ridiculous.

You create the timeline for your tasks. You tell the PM and they put that in their plan.

Anonymous wrote:

It is your job to tell the PM what work needs to be done, money you need and the date it will be done.

...

In my experience, PM's have to schedule meetings because engineers/workers refuse to talk to each other if a meeting is not scheduled.

Arguing with people who are actually doing the work to complete your projects will not endear you to those people.

My coworkers would disagree, at least the competent ones disagree.

Also I was not arguing I was explaining.