The funny thing about project managers is that they seem to have little else to do other than upset the system admins, of course as I’m a systems admin you may think that my point of view is a bit skewed. But I’d like to point out that I’m perfectly balanced with a chip on each shoulder, it has also been along time since I set anyone on fire. In order that the project keeps running we (the systems admins) will defer to the project managers – even when we know that they are less use than a chocky fire guard and that they a spouting absolute garbage, (After playing with google for a couple of days most of them have at least worked that bit out). In all the years that I have been forced to work with project managers I’ve only worked with two that could cut the mustard. It is my opinion that project management is one of these funny professions that people fall into when they find that there isn’t anything else that they can do! You know the way that it works, Oh! he’s really good at X we’d better promote him, hey he’s really good at Y we’d better promote him again – he’s £”({!^% useless at that – well we’d better leave him where he is then. And so a new project manager is born, so as not to seem too sexist she can be substituted for he above.
The danger that we all face is that the project managers have convinced them selves that they are correct when no one else was around, this usually results in someone leading the charge to the top of the cliff where every one is expected to do an impersonation of a stampede of Lemmings. Where every one seems to be intent in leaping off the nearest Lemming friendly cliff, I’d like to point out that this can lead to some minor problems afterwards when a business had no hope of resolving it’s problems. Again I hear you say that there is not much lkelihood of that happening – but it will – I have seen this many times.
The experience that I’ve had in respect of project managers has in general been pretty poor, I’ve been involved in IT projects for over 30 years and in all of that time have met only two project managers that had the ability to chew Gum and type at the same time. Over the years that I have worked with project managers, there have been a number of incidents that have led me to these conclusions. I have been lied to, blamed for problems and have had specialists brought in to do jobs that I’ve said couldn’t be done (Only to be proved correct) by project managers. As I said earlier in this post I’ve worked with two project managers that I would consider anyway competent, to them I would say thanks Dave and James (not Jim) it was good working with you.
I worked on a project, completed not too long ago. Where the original quote for the work was 3 days and a cost of sixty thousand pounds ($100,000), this was run by a project manager that managed to change those figures to 3 years and three million pounds ($4,800,000). Strangely enough this was considered a success, even though the new equipment went onto legacy support the day after it went live. Now it’s all change for the IT department of the company where I work, for the fourth time in the past 10 years. And if you’d like to take a stab at who’s going to lead the charge it’s the project managers, just to make sure that I have an other two years work – goodness gracious how generous is this company.
For the last project we had only one project manager, his teachings were invaluable – not only did he reinforce my perception of project managers. He also taught me that all the jokes about the Irish were based on fact (apologies to any Irish with an IQ of more than 0.1), while managing to completely bollox up the project. This time there are going to be multiple project managers involved, so as the image caption says, there’s only one thing worse than a project manager – that’s multiple project managers.