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Literally dealing with that right now. The project manager is on site, and I thought that I’d finally have some backup on putting together this monster project. He’s so far been asking a lot of questions legitimately trying to wrap his head around what he’s seeing.
I’m the most (only) experienced person on the project and I don’t like it.
I’d recommend telling the project manager exactly that. Ask him to schedule working sessions with you to start getting the project plan started. That way you can answer any questions they have during the meeting, and if not you two can note that as an action item for one of you to figure out. That first plan doesn’t have to be perfect just a draft that’s good enough to start seeing general resources needs and timeframes for those resources.
Your project manager is your friend as long as you are honest and upfront about what you require to accomplish your job.
Source: project manager since 2007, PMO leadership for the past 4 years.
Oh you see, this is a project that’s been going on for years, and I started into it six months ago to get it done by 2025. It’s not just a computer thing, but a robot with a lot of both hardware and software work. Naturally last month suddenly a lot of overhauls were made to the design, and since I’ve single handedly installed all of them, no one person except for me is familiar with exactly how everything fits together. The project plan and timeline is “get it done fasterer.” At this point they will throw whatever material resources are needed to me, but we just don’t have the personnel aside from me.
The project management is also not from the same continent as me, so meetings are a painful thing to schedule. The manager has finally come to the US to oversee the last round of acceptance work.
Right now the mechanicals are 99.9% done and I’m interacting remotely with software people to be their onsite hands.
The project manager is flittering around the room.
I totally understand. I have been in similar situations as well. That is good that they are willing to give you whatever resources you need to get the job done. Unfortunately it also seems like you are the what we call the “single point of failure” as well, which means all the project knowledge is in your head. So with out you the project is pretty much just dead. That is a good spot to be in for job security but a terrible place to be for work/life balance.
My suggestion would be to escalate the project delivery date as a risk every single meeting and in every communication that you send on the subject. Also escalate that you are the single point of failure and that situation needs to be remedy ASAP. That way you are covering your rear end if the dates slip and the deliverables are not ready or not as expected.
I’m getting us over a needed benchmark this week, doing a handoff meeting to somebody, and then coming back in December to jointly work on it with them. At that point all the work should be done and it should be more of giving them a tour of the thing. Everyone knows this is a terrible situation. A lot of things went wrong to get us here.
Edit: Having a coffee right now after fixing an automation thing from another company which attaches to our robot. The guy that company sent was “I dunno what’s wrong with it.” I just want to sit next to my cat, paint minis, and watch Stargate.
I just want to sit next to my cat, paint minis, and watch Stargate.
Hell yeah, that sounds like an excellent way to spend the day!
That’s the “One minute manager” bullshit. It’s literally just popping in randomly to course correct.
It’s distracting as fuck as a engineer.
So I ask Bert (my grey) every night “Are you ready?” before putting him to bed and I never really thought about it until the day he screamed it back at me as I was leaving for work one morning. I was in fact not ready at all and it was brutal coming from him.
Both project managers at my company quit at the same time. Rather than replace the PMs, my employers are having us engineers figure out what customers want and all the dates. It’s super hard! Yesterday I sat through an hour-long meeting for a project that never needed to happen… while my other projects are late.
So it turns out those guys were actually doing a lot of work, and spreading it out (to people who suck at it) was not a good idea. I actually enjoyed my job before this, and it’s starting to feel like time for a change. In my experience it never gets better and you should always jump ship sooner rather than later.
Pm is the worst because in my experience you not only have to keep track of every little detail you also usually have to hold the customers hand through the process and if you’re not experienced in doing that can create a lot of headaches.
I also just really dislike pointless meetings.
A good project manager is generally worth a couple of bodies they’re helping manage. Unless your teams are all comprised of Superstars, they get more done with less.
Absolutely! But it also depends on the size of the company. Small companies can absolutely benefit from PMs. I used to take freelance clients as a engineer, and never accepted a job without a PM who was willing to block out the noise.
In big companies though, I have a lot of disdain for PMs.
Many literally spend their hours being the middleman between actual stakeholders. I recently had a project where the PM was just forwarding emails from one department lead to another. They didn’t understand the product or cared to follow any processes. Then distracting my team for status updates so they can build reports in Excel, so they can feed it up the chain if something was done or not.
Fortunately, our retros are heavily engineer-centric and we can give harsh feedback/fire our PMs, which we have done successfully over the past few years.
Company hires eight parrots as project workers because they are all able to say
- ‘we need to move the project deadline back by two weeks’
- ‘get back to me tomorrow’
- ‘can we do a zoom call to discuss this?’
- ‘I’m waiting on material from parrot #5’
- ‘I’m waiting on material from parrot #4’
- ‘Our shipment hasn’t arrived yet’
- ‘What was the project goal again?’
- ‘We need another project manager’
Replace parrot with ChatGPT and it stops being funny and starts being relatable.
Parrot also needs to learn how to say “what will be the completion date on that item?”
And of course the follow-up response to any answer given: “you have half that long”
And this is why we do The Scotty Principle
One of my measures of how good a manager is would be how they come into a room. A good manager (I’ve had a few) will come in and silently assess how things are running (because they’ve already looked up info themselves) or ask specific questions that show they understand the state of things and are there to help if needed.
Pull the “how are things looking” crap, and the rating drops quickly. And the funny thing is, the ones who do that didn’t actually want to hear the bad news I will eagerly pull up to drown them in. The look on their faces is worth it.
Basically, I can glean how much a manager knows about an operation by what first comes out of their mouth, and way too often it’s not much that’s useful.
Had a director one who would start meetings with “Let’s get the worst news done first”.
On the occasion when there was no good news he’d say “Good news is we get to try again”
I miss that guy sometimes.
Totally agree. Drives me insane with drive-by status updates.
It’s this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2rmir6/why_developers_hate_being_interrupted/
Always funny to share stuff like this in the company meme channel and watch Project Managers trying to cope.
I’ve had good project managers that really do make things run smoothly and take a ton of stress of the team. More often I’ve had the worse than useless ones that add workload rather than alleviate it.
Scrum in five minutes, scrum in five minutes, AWWWK!
Stupid feathered overachiever!
Parrot can’t say anything if it’s muted.
