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| Project Manager This post is borne from personal experience of the last twenty years or so working in IT for two different companies, many different customers and numerous projects. My work is pretty much the same whatever - I build and configure firewalls of varying flavours on various hardware platforms. Oddly enough, the project management has always been pretty much the same - chaotic. In the last 3 working days, call it 22.5 hours, I have spent 2hrs 5mins on two conference calls where the sum total of my contribution has been four words: I've said my name. Twice. Two different projects, two different PMs. It isn't that I want to attend these things. I get the invite, roll my eyes, e-mail the PM to check my attendance is necessary and then think of the work I won't get done because I will be sat on a call listening to people talking about the work that has to get done. I mean, for fuck's sake. In response to my e-mails begging forgiveness the PM will generally say, "We might need you for something." Might. For something. Is it just me or does that sound like first degree vagueness to anyone? I blame the whole concept. According to Wikipedia, "Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives." Contrast "specific project goals and objectives" with "might need you for something". I'm already working on your project, I already have work lined up to complete the project's goals and objectives but that isn't enough. You need me to sit and waste time talking about the work I am going to be doing. Or not as the recent case(s) might be. It's rare that a call concludes without reference to 'how urgent the work is' as well. My teeth grind as I resist the urge to state the obvious, "Well, if I wasn't on this call I would be getting on with the work." Scroll further down the Wikipedia page and you come to "History of Project Management" and here is where we begin to understand the true nature of the beast. "Until 1900 civil engineering projects were generally managed by creative architects and engineers themselves." Really!? You do surprise me. People managed to complete work projects, whether big or small, in conjunction with each other, by using their own creativity and communicating. And they did it themselves. They project managed themselves. So all those Dark Ages castles, those medieval churches, hell, even the country houses of the landed gentry were completed by people using their own initiative to communicate and co-ordinate their ideas and plans to get the job done. And so it was from the dawn of humanity until the middle of the last century when "The 1950s marked the beginning of the modern Project Management era. Project management became recognized as a distinct discipline arising from the management discipline." And this seems, to me, to be pretty much where it went tits up. Big business in the post-war era needed jobs for a lot of guys who had just come back from trying to kill each other. Couple that with the consumer boom apparent in the States, and elsewhere shortly after, and a layer of middle managers is created whose sole purpose is to be 'Yes' men to the senior managers while achieving very little productive work. Sorry I forgot, they also arrange conference calls - lots of 'em. And what do middle managers need to keep them busy? That's right: project management. A whole slew of principles and techniques that crept out of the woodwork - Critical Chain Project Management, Agile Project Management, PRINCE2 - to slap a name on something that workers had been doing quite happily amongst themselves for centuries. |
Independent Music Discoveries: Issue #27
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